The house had fallen completely silent once more, but this time it lasted for only a moment.
The applause exploded, almost solid in its force. The stage and booth poles shook, jolting Diverus from his trance. He dropped the chimes he’d played and hunched against the rear corner.
As Soter had often described it—as it had happened so often for Bardsham—the audience began to chant not the puppeteer’s name, nor even Meersh’s, but rather: “Pe-nis! Pe-nis!” Even though Soter had recounted it to her dozens of times, Leodora found herself howling with joy at the daft sound of it. She stood to take her bow again, but found that she couldn’t move. A ghost hovered in the booth beside her, hearing the same cacophony from the audience; his hand rested with hers around the rods that controlled the puppet of Meersh. She could not see him clearly but only in the periphery, at the very edge of the visible, where she could just assemble an impression of his sparkling eyes, bright with pleasure, expressing such pride that her breath caught and the heat foretelling tears burned her cheeks. He had stood there—in the very spot—basked in this very afterglow of the performance. She retained no memory of his face, knowing it only from Soter’s descriptions, yet she’d no doubt who was smiling upon her.
She managed to whisper: “Father.”
A hand touched her opposite shoulder. She turned to find Diverus there, and in that instant the sound of the crowd, which had submerged below the strangeness, came roaring over her again.
The ghost of Bardsham was gone.
“Diverus,” she said.
He took a step back. “The audience. Soter.”
The words meant nothing. She couldn’t focus on that. She turned to the open undaya case into which she placed each puppet after its use, grabbed the ribbons at both ends of the top boxes, and lifted them away.
“Lea, what is the matter?” Diverus asked.
“Him. You saw him. You must have.” She handed the boxes to him, stacking them on his arms.
“Saw who?”
She tugged up the false bottom, holding her breath in anticipation . . . but his question penetrated. “You didn’t see?”
Diverus studied her face, back and forth from eye to eye. Then he peered past her, into the box, and her own gaze traveled after his, into the recess where the powdery gray Coral Man lay, silent, calcified. Lifeless.
“I thought—” She broke off. Now the tears came and she couldn’t explain why or what had happened. She wrapped her arms around Diverus, buried her face against his neck. His hands pressed tight to her back to hold her. He asked for no explanation. He let her weep.
The crowd thundered so loudly that the theater shook with their calls for “Jax!”
When Soter stuck his head in and saw them, he yelled, “Are you two insane—get out here!”
Diverus looked across at him, a face Soter had never seen before, one that was cold and protective and challenging. He understood then the nature of the embrace, if not its cause. Then he realized the Coral Man had been exposed and he reeled back. Whatever had happened, he could not venture in to find out its nature. He fled into the protective confines of his role, in which he had only to face the far less intimidating ire of an audience about to be disappointed in its demands. He waved his hands and hoped he could control them.
II
PONS ASINORUM
ONE
Diverus awoke far too early. The theater and its environs lay so dark and silent that the only thing he could hear, lying in the small room, was the distant chatter of morning birds in the fig trees along the boulevard. He rose onto his knees, pushed the unlatched shutters apart, and leaned out the window for a better look.
The boulevard lay off to the right, around the curve of the theater’s white stucco wall and just out of sight. His view was of the smooth wall of a neighboring building, purplish in the predawn light, with a single, dark window directly across from his own, its pane made of round colored quarrels of yellow and red. He wondered if the quarrels would taste sweet if licked.
It had been three days since Jax’s premiere performance on Colemaigne, and it seemed to him that life had become a perpetual bustle ever since that name had roared up into the sky. That first evening had provided a modicum of what once had been a nightly occurrence here. Word had spread quickly,