In short order he saw a jeweler—a horned faun—selling bracelets and necklaces, many of which dangled from its leathery wrists; a chandler peddling bulbous orange candles—according to a sign, these would replenish by day to be burned again by night; a huge, ogreish seller of knives and next to him a duo performing sword swallowing to the delight of a small crowd. Farther on, a woman with vestigial wings was juggling painted balls while balancing barefoot on a rope a few feet off the ground. These performers must have gathered as word got out that the ban had been lifted. Had they been waiting in their houses for a dozen years, practicing in secret, or were they newly arrived off the neighboring span of Sacbé, which after all lay just on the far side of the great tower gateway?
The central gateway was framed by figures carved in high relief, one male and one female. Seeing them, he stopped, turned, and approached. On the left was a winged male figure with arms pointing skyward above it, in the act of bursting from the pedestal base. It was an exciting, active figure, but he paid it hardly any mind after the first glance, because of the effigy to the right of the archway. It was a female figure with long unjointed arms that ended in sharp sinuous fingers. A wild halo of seaweed hair on which small shells and starfish balanced surrounded her face, which was not entirely human. The eyes, wide and as perfectly round as her breasts, were like the eyes of an afrit, blank and terrible, although he knew they were black. Her mouth smiled in fierce and irrefutable invitation. Sing for me! Her command echoed in his mind. The lower half of her body, emerging from the elaborate plinth as out of a fountain, appeared to metamorphose from flesh to scales. Her sex—the lowest part of her showing above the lip of the plinth—was masked by a ribbed shell. He raised his eyes to the circular windows dotting the whole length of the wall and wondered if such creatures lived behind each.
As he stood gawking, a stilt walker abruptly materialized out of the dark gateway before him, wearing loose bright blue-and-green skirts almost to the ground, scarves and clinking bracelets seemingly awhirl. Affixed to the walker’s head was a grotesque and oversized laughing mask. Long, thickly woven strands of dark hair surrounded that face of japery. Then, in an impressive feat as he walked past, the walker somehow doubled over on the stilts and reached down to hand Diverus a coin. It was copper and bore a face like that of the stilt walker’s mask on one side. He flipped it over, and a similarly distorted face snarled at him from the other side. Glancing up again, he watched the stilt walker pivot on one leg and then seemingly—at least from Diverus’s perspective—continue along while walking backward, with the cruel face from the back of the coin now facing forward.
He watched transfixed as the giant figure strode nimbly around every impediment; meanwhile the laughing face jeered back at him like a taunt, a clown’s jape. Encountering a group of people, the walker bent over again, parallel to the ground, and flung out more coins, then righted up, pivoted, placing the snarling face in the back once more, and strode on. Diverus could no longer be certain which was front and which back.
He pocketed the curious coin but chose not to follow. He’d been teased and tricked enough for one morning.
Later then, as he waited in line to purchase more of the sweet pastries for everyone in the theater, he gasped with the sudden realization that for the first time in his life he was alone and free in the world. He was with no one and no one knew where he was. He could have turned right then and run through that broad gate and into worlds unknown, or gone up inside that tower wall and hunted for the merwoman who’d beguiled him. And knowing that he could, he knew he never would. He never would abandon Leodora, the more so because she had handed him this gift of freedom. The merwoman had shown him he could embrace a death that he’d yearned toward secretly since the moment his mother had sunk from view in the underworld of Vijnagar—whether she’d intended to or not, the creature had proffered that choice. If he had