The Tales of Tarya, Books 1-3

Chapter 3 - Columbina-3

Once the twisting smoke reached the stage, it became harder to see because of the shadows caused by the drop cloths that hung from the opened roof, filtering the sunlight, although the flashes of gold light became more pronounced. Mina watched them flowing into the wings, winking in and out, until they hovered around Harlequin. His chest was raised as he took deep breath after deep breath, sucking in the smoke and sparks avidly. This was where the tugging sensation was coming from, Mina saw. Somehow Harlequin was drawing smoke and sparks to him.

Mina looked out toward the audience again, seeking the source of the smoke. The crowd looked much like every other audience she had ever seen, wrapped in the playing as it unfolded, eyes glazed over, many mouths hanging open. Everyone looked half asleep. Mina remembered Aldo’s revelation that players stole dreams to create their performances. Maybe this hypnotised state allowed the dreams to be returned to the audience. But the flow of smoke and stars only went one way, from the audience to the stage. A shaft of sunlight lit the glazed faces of the crowd and Mina saw clearly. Every strand of smoke, alive with flashing sparks, came from an audience member. Their every breath emitted a tiny cloud of white glinting with gold, and when they sighed it became a gush.

When the crowd laughed, the smoke billowed straight up for a moment before arcing toward the stage again, thick now with the gold sparks. Yet there were also three clear columns of air, empty tunnels reaching upward into the blue sky. Three people gave out no spirit smoke, nor any sparks. One was a lean old man, his face sagging and deeply lined. Another was a middle-aged woman who twisted a lock of hair unknowingly in her hand. They looked terribly familiar to Mina, each ghostly pale with deep, bruised shadows beneath their eyes and a haunted, empty expression on their faces. In her travels with the troupe she had seen people like this in most towns, and her guess was these were the people whose golden threads had been broken by the players, leaving part of their being trapped in Tarya, and their hearts locked in despair.

Finally she looked to where she had briefly glimpsed the third column of empty air. Right at the back of the crowd stood Colum or, as she was now sure, Paolo. He was completely still, unlike everyone else who, though absorbed in the playing, nevertheless fidgeted and fiddled. As she watched he broke away from the audience, walking toward the edge of the terrace.

With a little cry she stepped down from the stage. At the same moment there was a movement behind her and she turned to see Roberto lunging toward where she had just been. He stumbled, regained his balance, and came down the steps after her. The audience, thinking it part of the performance now she had established her credentials, parted for her, allowing her to walk through them rapidly. When she did not speak, however, they quickly lost interest and returned their attention to the scene still going on onstage. Roberto was suddenly unable to move through the press of the crowd. As Mina slipped away, she heard him swearing at people as he gave up following her and tried to regain the stage.

Ahead, Colum moved quickly. Once she had broken through the crowd, Mina had to jog to catch up with him. They left the main terraced area and entered the lower part of the village, where houses shouldered each other, winding down the hilltop. Suddenly Paolo disappeared between two houses. Mina cried out his name, breaking into a run. When she reached the gap, she saw it was actually an open gateway. A rough-hewn stone path led to the back of one of the houses.

Panicked at the fear of losing him again, Mina rounded the corner of the house and ran straight into him. He caught her with both arms and held her, searching her face, a small smile lighting his own.

Mina stared back. Up close she could easily see it was Paolo. He had grown as tall as Papa, though he was still slender, without Papa’s menacing bulk. With a bittersweet start, Mina realised he looked a lot like their father now, though the eyes gazing back at her were so like their mother’s it startled her. His beribboned hair had given him a youthful appearance, but now she was close to him, Mina could see faint lines etched a story of sadness around his eyes.

Suspended in time, brother and sister drank in the sight of each other, unaware of their surroundings. Paolo reached out a hand to stroke Mina’s hair, then passed it over her head, measuring how tall she had become. Mina pulled Paolo into a tight embrace, breathing in the long forgotten scent of her brother; soap and peppermint.

‘I’m so sorry I didn’t recognise you,’ she whispered, hugging him tight.

‘Columbina, my little dove. My little dove,’ Paolo repeated, his voice like a melody to Mina’s ears. He began to coo softly.

Mina pulled back and looked at him again, searching. Something was different. His skin was deeply tanned, his eyes bright, and he gazed back at her without blinking. He continued the strange cooing sound.

‘Paolo … why didn’t you come home? Why did you stay here?’

His hands dropped to his side and he looked up at the sky. Then he put his hands together and made the shape of wings, fluttering them together, raising them up.

‘Knew my little dove would come,’ he said, pulling Mina into another hug. He still cooed softly.

‘Paolo,’ Mina pulled back, ‘do you remember reaching me in Tarya? Not long ago, I found you …’

A sharp cough behind her made Mina turn. Finally she took in her surroundings. She was in a small orchard at the back of a house. Nearby a wrought-iron table and chairs sat under an apple tree. Behind the house two terraces arose, each with beds of flowers and herbs, and beyond a fence was what looked like the elaborately tiled terrace of the town square they had just left, although there was no sign of the crowds, so it might be another part of the town. The house itself was whitewashed clay with a single row of tilework around a bright blue door. All in all it was a pretty, well-maintained little garden at the back of someone’s house. She had walked into a private courtyard.

In front of the blue door stood an old woman in black, her hair covered by a scarf. She was tiny, her face shrunken and deeply wrinkled, like an apple left in the bottom of the barrel for too long.

‘He won’t talk to you,’ the old woman said, her voice scratchy. ‘He doesn’t talk. Lived with me these ten years, never says boo to a bird. Just endless cooing, and occasionally that girl’s name …’

But Mina didn’t hear any more of the old woman’s words. She was frozen to the spot, her arms fallen to her sides. Realisation flooded her so quickly she grew cold all over and shook her head, trying to dislodge the terrible thought.

She turned back to her brother and knew for certain. Paolo was not pale; his eyes were not lined with black shadows. But she saw, finally, there was something missing in his gaze. As she watched, he burst into a smile of pure, unadulterated joy, the innocent happiness of a child.

‘You family?’ the old woman asked. ‘Knew someone’d come, some day. Litonya, it’s a big place, but he’s a good lad. Always hoped someone’d miss him. Helps out how he can. He knows you, don’t he? I’ve taken good care of him.’

Paolo darted over to the old woman and gestured, communicating with his fluttering hands that Mina was tall now, but last time he saw her she was small. The old woman nodded.

‘You his sister? What’s his name then?’

‘Paolo,’ Mina said. Like a key tumbling in a lock, everything dropped into place in her thoughts. The shadowed people, with their despair, like Katriela—they were the ones who had lost their dreams. People like Paolo, who had their golden threads broken, whose souls were left trapped in the River of Light, weren’t left that way. They were left mad.

‘The children always call him Colum, coz that’s the only word he’ll say.’ The old woman stopped and looked more carefully at Mina, realisation suddenly striking her as well. ‘You didn’t know, did ya? He wasn’t like this the last time you saw him, eh? A bit simple?’

Mina shook her head. Her mind was still racing toward a last, terrible understanding. If Paolo was like this because a player had broken his thread, then Uncle Tonio … It had not been grief at all that had left her uncle the butt of village jokes, a babbling fool. It had been vengeance. He had tried to keep an Innaroi girl, a player girl, as his wife, and in keeping her away from her family he had driven her to despair. Her death had led her troupe to destroy him.

The goodness Mina thought she saw in Uberto and Mama Tina could only be a façade, for clearly they destroyed any who got in their way. What better way to defeat your enemy than to make them mad? Was that what Uberto had tried to do to her? If she had not stopped him, she would be like this too. How many others were there?

Paolo dropped to his knees in front of her, clutching her leg and cooing softly. Mina stroked his knotted hair, grief welling up for his lost life, and the lost life of her uncle. Both could have been great men. Both had been reduced to this, needing care, unable to communicate, disconnected from their strength and future.

Mina gently pulled Paolo’s arms away from her leg and knelt down so she was face to face with him.

‘I won’t leave you like this, Paolo. The man who did this to you, he tried to kill me, but I stopped him. I have abilities … I’m not really sure how to use them properly yet, but I can face him. I have to. I’ll stop him doing this to anyone else, and I’ll make him show me how to fix it. There must be a way.’

She gently kissed his cheek, then brushed a stray dreadlock off his forehead. He looked back at her with wide, trusting eyes and cooed softly.

~

‘He’s like a toddler,’ Sofia said, nodding to where Paolo lay on the grass, piling stones together then knocking them down. With every demolition he giggled and began again. It was still the height of summer and though it was late in the day the sun shone with a deep warmth. The two story tellers sat together at the wrought-iron table, sipping port from small blue glass goblets. Mina nodded sadly.

‘It’s like the Paolo I spoke to in Tarya, who communicated how he was trapped, is different to this one. Colum remembers me, but he can’t really talk to me.’

She leaned forward and picked up the pale mask Sofia had stolen from Uberto. They had finally had a chance to examine it closely in this secluded spot.

‘Do you think this has anything to do with it? I’ve never seen it used in any performance.’

‘I’ve never seen a mask like this before either,’ Sofia replied, ‘but it must be important given how hard Uberto and the black-haired girl tried to get it back. It looks ancient.’

Sofia turned it over, her fingers slipping on the burnished surface. There was something eerie about the mask. Only the holes for eyes and nostrils, and a small slit in the thin lips, detracted from the sense of looking at a corpse. Made of leather so pale it was almost white, it was smooth to the touch. In the late afternoon sun it glimmered, as though dusted with gold.

They had been talking for an hour, and much to her surprise Mina had learned Sofia caught glimpses of a place Mina knew to be the Plain of Seas, in Tarya, when she told her stories. She described feeling occasionally as if she stood near the edge of a great ocean; could almost see people or shapes rising from it, if she truly lost herself in the story. It was always hazy, like something seen through mist. She had never told anyone about these strange experiences for risk of being accused of Arcani. It only ever occurred when the stories she created flowed really well.

‘I discovered how to do this when I was starting out as a story teller,’ Sofia explained, ‘but when I showed my master teller, he told me I was cursed and banished me from his side. You see, it only happened when I made changes to stories, not when I stuck to the acceptable repertoire of tales. I should have known better. My master never did like me doing it, even without knowing what I saw. He said no story teller ever did, but I had heard rumours from other apprentices on the road. There’s always been an idea that the original story teller made up whole stories. She would have had to. She was the first—there wouldn’t have been stories to pass down. I’ve been trying to find out more about her all my life.’

Her eyes became distant for a moment.

‘Luckily my apprenticeship was all but finished, so I just set out on my own and stopped changing stories.’

Sofia had never been to any other part of Tarya. She listened attentively to Mina’s explanation of the other realms, as much as she understood them. But as the afternoon slipped away, their discussion petered out as they realised they were no closer to discovering how their abilities and knowledge could be used to heal Paolo, if, in fact, he could be healed.

Paolo had seemed absorbed in his pile of stones for the entire conversation, shaping different patterns, but now he stood up and crept toward the table with a sideways motion, like a small child about to misbehave and hoping not to be noticed.

‘Pretty,’ he cooed, his head on one side, his hand outstretched to the mask resting on the table. Every time the sun broke from behind a random cloud and struck the leather, the face gave off a gold spark.

‘Perhaps we’d better put it away …’ Mina began, just as Paolo reached for the mask. His fingers connected with the leather, grasping the empty face, and he let out a great howl of pain. Reflexively he flung his hand away, tossing the mask from him. It landed against the trunk of a miniature apricot tree.

A small animal raced across the grass, stopping when it reached the mask. It moved so quickly that only when it stood still, sniffing the leather, perhaps hoping for food, could Mina see it was a fox. Its fur was mottled, strangely patched in tan, brown and grey. But that was not the only strange thing.

With a glance at the two women sitting at the table, the fox’s face split into a wide grin. Quicker than a heartbeat, it took the mask in its mouth and turned to run away with a flick of its speckled tail.

‘Oh no you don’t,’ Mina said, leaping up. She reached for the first thing at hand, one of the goblets on the table, and hurled it at the creature. It hit the fox on its head and the tiny animal keeled over sideways, the mask dropping from its open mouth.

‘I’ve killed it,’ she said softly, taking a tentative step toward it. With relief she noticed the creature was panting, but there was a line of blood on the side of its face. She knelt and reached out, not really intending to touch the wound, acting on instinct.

In an instant the fox leaped up, baring tiny, exquisitely sharp fangs at her. It reached for the mask again, but this time with its front paws. Mina gasped as its paws extended, the tiny pads splitting and elongating. The fox seemed to expand and unfold all in one until a man stood before her, drawing the mask up to his face. He wore a diamond-dappled costume, and his eyes flickered through a rainbow of colours as he slipped the mask on.

Chapter 4