Left behind, Diverus fidgeted, stealing glances at Soter as he commented, “I’m new to human interactions, but I wonder that anybody understands anybody.” He, too, took his leave of the garden.
Alone, Soter toasted himself and, after downing the small cup of liquor, said, “Five, then. I can live with that. For now.”
The next three days, Leodora collected stories. Each day she checked the park before looking elsewhere. On the first day she did find a group playing go¯ there, but it wasn’t the fox and his friends, who never did reappear. “Maybe it takes a long time to go to the end of everything and come back,” said Diverus.
“But they invited us to come back the next day.” Even as she argued, she guessed the explanation, and before Diverus could say it she countered herself: “Days and nights aren’t the same to the demons in that parade.”
“That’s what I think, too,” Diverus replied. “What I meant.”
She roamed the entire span, eventually crossing onto the split on the far side of the valley of stilt houses, seeking groups, clusters of people at leisure whom she could chat up and ask for a story. She even came across the same palanquin bearers she had used in explaining story collecting to Diverus, and as she’d told him they did indeed serve up a plethora of salacious stories about their mistress. None of these could be performed, but they contained images and ideas and moments she might borrow, retool, and fold into some unrelated telling to make it unique.
She received stories such as the tale of the priest who was so lonely that he created an artificial friend, but got the spell horribly wrong so that his friend wanted most of all to eat him—a story she performed the same night, provoking both laughter and gasps.
The courtyard filled earlier each night. People declined to take dinner until afterward in order to get close to the booth.
The final performance in Hyakiyako, she concluded with a repeat rendition of “The Ghost of Nikki Danjo.” While the puppet of Masaoka pressed against the side of the screen and bit into her arm to keep from screaming, her son died in agony of poisoning. She dared not cry out, as the audience knew, else give away that she had discovered the identity of the real villain of the piece—Nikki Danjo himself.
Soter sat off to the side of the booth, both to watch Leodora’s skillful performance and to mingle with the crowd. Once again the courtyard was full to overflowing. Mutsu would be deliriously happy, almost as happy as he had been furious when Soter told him that they could not stay beyond five nights.
The crowd booed when the evil regent Nikki Danjo slid onto the screen again. The body language of the puppet implicated him as he crept across the room to advise his lord, and the puppet of Masaoka, behind him, equally betrayed her fear. Soter, though he was used to Leodora’s craft, found himself swept up in the tale. The puppets became real people. He could see the room that surrounded them rather than the shadow of doorways, screens, and lanterns. He heard not Leodora’s voice, but the voices of the overlord and the woman and the evil Danjo. He shook his head as if he’d begun to fall asleep, and blamed the many cups of rice wine he’d consumed. It was powerful stuff, and he wasn’t used to it. Plus, he conceded—if only to himself—Diverus’s music made her voice seem to change, adding weight and depth to the male voices. Soter drifted into it, his head nodding.
He straightened up on his stool, then rubbed his eyes while glancing around himself at the crowd, all so riveted by the performance that not one met his gaze. He found himself similarly drawn back to the pale screen, glowing lightly red now as the story neared an explosive climax. She had learned to increase the colors subtly, slowly, so that the audience hardly noticed that it had gone from white to crimson by the end of the play. Gods, he was proud of her! She had no idea how proud. Why didn’t he tell her? He ought to tell her.
Then, as he stared at the screen, it seemed to draw him in, growing darker the closer he came.
When he looked up, the courtyard had turned the color of blood, as if the light from her lantern had become liquid and smeared every surface.