for the best. He moaned and complained in a sloomy way, but was too slurry-witted to do more. With his head down, his eyes closed, he muttered her name, but she had already taken her position beneath the lantern and Soter was already making introductions to the audience, and she didn’t hear him. He barely heard himself. He sagged in defeat, his bones seemingly going soft. He had time for one final coherent thought—This is how Soter goes through life—before the tale was announced: “The Dream of Fortune.” Immediately his comprehension of his surroundings evaporated. Then the spirit invaded him. He acquiesced—not that he could have fought against it, which would have been like fighting against an undertow. He let it have his arms to raise, his lips to shape around the reed. It was as if he were observing himself from outside his own body, as though the source of his skill wanted nothing to do with him in his disgraceful, besotted state.
Then he blinked and the sensation of separateness collapsed. He became bound to the song, living but a fraction of a second ahead of it, his fingers guided to the holes of the shawm as if born to it, flowing eerie trills to shiver the bones. Music filled his mind to the exclusion of everything else. He became forged of music.
When it ended, the tale, he collapsed in a gray slumber, insensate, out of which he arose only when the succeeding tale was announced. His conscious self didn’t even hear his name, but his body took over, reached for the hourglass drum, which he could flex with his knees as he played.
Somewhere in the middle of that tale he began to sober up. An edge of self-awareness flowed through the movements as he drummed, as he picked up a guiro and scraped a stick along it to imitate the clacking of bones. I am Diverus, he repeated in his head. I am Diverus, and Leodora— He couldn’t finish, wasn’t even sure what it was he had intended to say. No, he wasn’t all that sober after all. Besides, he had no idea what she thought of him now, and it didn’t matter, not really. When he’d slept some, he would leave. If he was lucky, he would wake up in the middle of the night and nobody would miss him until he had gone far enough that he could begin as someone else, someone with no past, no name. He yearned to be the idiot that the gods had unmade, the simple creature that only felt things in a dumb way and didn’t have to think them.
When the performance ended he sank down again, aware as at a distance of applause, of cheers and shouts. They were happening somewhere else to someone else. He drifted into unconsciousness beneath the roar of waves pouring over him. Back into the water, came the thought. Let it pull him under for good and let sea creatures feast on him, turn him into a new coral man.
He considered it a fitting end, imagining himself as the creature in the case, down below the puppets, and like the case his mind grew dark and silent.
It was while Bois and Glaise were carrying Diverus up the steps to his room that the copper coin fell from his pocket, bounced on the step, and came to rest on Leodora’s bare foot.
In the light of the lamp she carried, she couldn’t tell what it was, just something shiny. “Wait a moment,” she called to the woodmen. She bent down and picked up the coin. Holding it up to the light, she muttered to them, “Go ahead, sorry, it fell from his clothes.” The distorted face on the coin seemed to be leering at her. She was certain she’d never seen it before.
Up the stairs then while she held the coin between thumb and forefinger, she’d almost caught up with Bois and Glaise when idly she turned the coin to see the other side, the second face.
She stopped.
The two woodmen reached the hallway, where they waited for Leodora to catch up to them with the light. When she didn’t arrive, they turned, but Leodora barely noticed them. She was hearing the lion as clearly as if it had just then awakened, saying to her: At once forward, at once backward. She flipped the coin over and over. “To and fro,” she whispered.
When she looked up, Bois and Glaise at each end of the drooping body of