see,” I said, just as Josette clucked her tongue angrily once again.
“The play’s starting,” she said.
I turned around immediately, glad for some excuse that would silence Alcibiades’ tongue, at least until I could spirit him back to his room. I was interested in this new development, but it was decidedly unhealthy as far as diplomatic relations went. At the same time, I was rather amused. One would think a stubborn old soldier like Alcibiades would hold his liquor better; it all seemed to have gone to his head in a matter of moments.
In the absence of so many lantern-bearers, the light in the dining hall was diffuse and dim. It complemented the setting before us, of a pale noblewoman clad in robes patterned with red and gold chrysanthemums. Her lips were painted a bright crimson, her hair swept up and pinned back with delicate gold ornaments that tinkled as she moved. She—he—was very beautiful. I didn’t know if the actor was the one that Alcibiades had taken an inadvertent fancy to, though.
A woman in plain dress sat at the front corner of the stage they’d set up, kneeling on a large, squat cushion. She held what I’d come to recognize as one of the traditional Ke-Han stringed instruments—with a long, slender neck, curved just at the top, and a stout, round body—and before I could think to warn Alcibiades, she’d swept the strings with her long fingernails and begun to sing.
Sure enough, I heard a grunt of displeasure at my back, though he was discreet enough to keep it subdued, at least. There was something to be thankful for.
“It is the… I am not sure what the word is in your language,” Lord Temur said, no doubt sensing this new tension. I should have liked to get to know Lord Temur a little better, but it was impossible to know where to begin with these Ke-Han men. “The storyteller? Perhaps narrator is more accurate, though it holds a double meaning in our language. She begins the story for the actors and the audience.”
“Lucky me,” Alcibiades muttered under his breath, and I leaned back nonchalantly to elbow him in the ribs.
From our table, even above the screens that the theatre troupe had set up, the Emperor’s face was visible. He looked neither entertained, nor bored, nor put out in the slightest by the music. I wondered if there were anything at all that could put an expression on Emperor Iseul’s face. Then I remembered the duel between the Emperor and General Alcibiades and felt the keen prick of interest once more.
It was at times like that when I wished our instruction had been more specialized to deal with the current Ke-Han dynasty, and not simply the various ways one was expected to bow to them. What background, for example, had these men experienced? How many years of despising us had carved their features to be so fierce and so fine in our presence? What had Emperor Iseul been like as a child? I knew he had not been timid and uncertain, but more than anything, I longed for the intimate details of daily life, not the masks we saw, like so many layers of makeup, as though the Emperor might just as well have been a princess hidden in the moon, so remote from us was he.
“It’ll be a little hard to understand what they’re saying, don’t you think?” Alcibiades hissed at me.
“It’s about the mood, my dear,” I said. “Please try to concentrate.”
Alcibiades looked disappointed—perhaps he was expecting me to agree with him on everything, once I’d demonstrated such a grand display of solidarity—but he did as he was asked. If we were lucky, the wine’s effects were wearing off, or he was doing his best to imagine himself in an indeterminate elsewhere, a simple place, undisturbed by Ke-Han song.
“Ah,” Lord Temur said. “Here are the suitors.”
They filed out one after the other, each more resplendent than the last. They held themselves with dramatic poise—an adopted nobility that in some ways echoed Emperor Iseul’s posture or Prince Mamoru’s elegance, but which were at the same time merely shadows of the real thing, reflections caught in a clouded mirror. The first suitor was dressed in scarlet—I heard Alcibiades snort with amusement at my side—the second in emerald, the third in rich blue sapphire, the fourth in silver, and the fifth in gold. Their faces were indistinct, all white with shocks of red at their lips and cheeks, their thick black brows