The Tales of Tarya, Books 1-3

Chapter 13 - Masks and Madness-3

‘Every troupe, Mina. Every troupe.’

‘How can we be seeing this? It’s not real. It’s not possible!’

The colours of the vision seemed to bleed outward in vicious smears of red and black.

‘This is not just the Place of Dreams, child. If you see only the good, and the hopeful, you miss the darkness. There is more darkness in this world than you can imagine, Mina. This is the Place of Nightmares.’

‘But this is about us … about players.’

‘You see my nightmares,’ Uberto said, and the vision dissolved, only to reform. It all began again.

Mina took a deep breath, and sent out her thoughts. Look for the good … there! Almost instantly she found what she sought, and without moving she stood, Uberto by her side, in front of a new scene that played itself out. A child stood alone, at first, a child richly dressed, perhaps a nobleman’s son. Then he seemed to grow, his clothes sliding into the costume of Il Capitano, his face lengthening and darkening into a mask. In an instant the scenery of the royal stage appeared. Player after player winked into being around the boy-man, and he was at the centre of a canovaccio, playing to an invisible, appreciative audience.

‘They wouldn’t destroy us. They love us! This boy wants to be a player. A nobleman’s son, and he dreams of being a poor player.’

Uberto turned from the scene, and it faded quickly as though it had never been. ‘Remember the harpist? Remember the villages? The attacks?’

Mina remembered the woman who had approached her as they were leaving the village, and she remembered.

Uberto drew her to another corner of the dream world before she could catch the thought. He swept his hand out to show her another dream. ‘This is why they hate us!’

In this dream, they saw a line of wagons, and they were drawn toward each one in turn. In the first, an Innaroi woman sat reading the cards for a pair of young women. As Mina watched, the young women changed, just a little, in that strange, invisible shifting of dreams. Their faces lost the freshness of youth, their mouths taking a cynical turn, their eyes becoming knowing. The Innaroi woman’s shadow grew on the wall, reaching out toward the girls with grasping hands even as she sat at the table, pointing at cards and nodding her head benignly. Then the walls of the next wagon dissolved, and Mina saw a young woman in an Inamorata costume seducing a young man, as others clamoured outside. In the third wagon …

‘No!’ Mina cried, reaching out again, and the third wagon began to move. She and Uberto floated above it, watching as it travelled winding roads, like a raft on a river. From their distant view, they saw figures tumble out and relax by a gleaming river, basking in freedom.

‘Very clever!’ Uberto exclaimed. ‘Some see us as digressing all decency, some see us as merely revelling in freedom. But when a mob gets together, do you think they see the best?’

The landscape spread out below them dissolved. Mina stood alone near the Horizon to the Place of Dreams, amongst the darkness of nightmares. This time she was caught amongst the dream figures, surrounded. At first it seemed there was just a circle of players, perhaps initiating a new player. They held their masks out before them, then solemnly placed them on their faces. One by one they began to transform, and within an instant, Mina understood she was seeing someone’s terrible, terrible nightmare through their eyes.

As each player changed, they became subtlety, indescribably terrifying. Eyes bulged, teeth turned to fangs, hooked or clawed arms stretched out impossibly. She felt herself growing smaller as the grotesque, less than human figures reached for her, distorted faces staring. The darkened leather of their masks was like dead flesh, their eyes black pits. Then the hard leather began to move, slowly but inexorably, into sickening leers, brows growing heavier, noses more hooked. If they touched her they would take from her, an endless theft, leaving her hollow, shadowed out.

‘How can they see us like this?’ Mina cried, and then remembered, finally, what had eluded her minutes before, about the village.

‘Children!’ she cried out. The grotesquery around her became opaque, fading in clouds of nothingness. ‘You said it was wrong to harm children!’

Suddenly Uberto was standing next to her again. The nightmare players continued to dissolve, drifting away in wisps. Uberto watched this dissolution, not speaking, and Mina saw tears hovered at the corners of his eyes, ready to fall. His hands dropped to his side, the mask fell to the floor, and his shoulders bowed under a terrible weight.

‘Uberto, you said it was wrong to harm children. Somebody broke the child’s thread. They left the child unable to speak.’

Uberto turned to face Mina. As the world around them shifted and dissolved, only his eyes, steel grey, seemed unchanging.

‘Even Mourini would never … even he …’

Uberto looked down, his shoulders crushed. Tarya dissolved around them. They stood on the stage in the royal ballroom.

Mina reached for Uberto’s hands. ‘Will you talk to the Council? If you do, I won’t need to.’

‘Mina, I will make sure no child’s thread is broken again. We will find out who did it, and they will be expelled from the players. It will be an example to all that we police our own.’

Uberto knelt and picked up the two discarded masks. Mina felt herself relax. A flicker of movement at the side of the stage caught her attention briefly, but seeing nothing there she turned back to Uberto, relieved at his acquiescence. Uberto would deal with this. He would know how to talk to the Council. He would protect the children. She wanted to believe him. Yet their argument, played out in the Place of Dreams, hung unresolved between them, and Mina realised she hadn’t convinced Uberto of anything. He hadn’t acceded to what she had desperately tried to show him, that the players weren’t feared and hated. In fact, what he’d shown her was a fairly convincing argument that if the truth about the threads came out, players could be in great danger. He stood frozen now, staring at the inside of Harlequin’s mask, his head slightly c****d as though he was listening to silent music.

‘How are you going to raise the issue of the threads with the Council?’ she asked, unable to let it go, uncertain of where it was going.

Uberto smiled a half smile, his fingers loosely tying together the mask straps. ‘I remember a little girl,’ Uberto said, looking out to an audience that wasn’t there. His shoulders straightened, his movements quickened, and in a deft sleight of hand he slid the Harlequin mask back onto his face. ‘Many years ago now, in a tiny village, far, far from here.’ He stretched his lithe arm out, Harlequin again with his mercurial movements.

‘I never forgot her. She was pretty and bright. I would have remembered her even if her brother had not joined our troupe, because she had a gift. I watched her, when she didn’t see me. I saw what she did, and I wanted to learn how to do it too. It was a challenge. You would not imagine a child so young could challenge me, a player of many years, but she did.’

Mina found herself standing in the centre of the square at Andon, by the fountain, watching her child self chattering away to nobody. Another memory surfaced, and she watched it play out in front of her. She had told a story to the stone children of the fountain, a story about … about a mermaid. And a tiny figure, human, but with the tail of a fish, had flicked water at her and giggled. She was in Tarya, but this was no dream. This was her memory, shown to her by Harlequin. That had been the first, the only time she had brought something out of her tale into the world, before her father robbed her of her tales. Had it been the day the players were in Andon that she did that? He must have been watching her and seen. They stood together now on the Plain of Seas, the dark blue ocean beneath their feet thrashing, the air around them billowing and blowing into a storm. This little conjuring of the fountain was a sanctuary of calm amidst the tempest.

Harlequin danced around as he spoke, performing his speech. ‘I remember the first day I met that little girl. I knew she was special even then. She asked me, “What are you?” Such a clever little thing. I promised to answer her one day. She has never stopped challenging me, and I have learned from her. I have learned how to make use of a part of Tarya that always puzzled me, this formless place. Its secrets have always been closed to me. Yet she showed me what could be done. Now she challenges me to do the right thing.’

Harlequin stopped his cavorting and stood nose to nose with Mina, still trembling slightly, unable to be still. He spelled out each word slowly. ‘I am a player, Mina. A player.’

Mina placed both hands on his face. The mask felt warm, imbued with the life of its wearer, the leather supple as skin.

‘I see in your eyes you’re a good man, Uberto,’ she said.

He pulled away and was off, dancing again. ‘Uberto is a good man, yes, but I, I am Harlequin, purveyor of dreams, teller of riddles. I do not live without the playing. Remember, child, I may be who I am not, but I may be who I am. Who is to say?’

Mina pushed through his riddling. ‘You will talk to the Council?’

‘Uberto will talk about the child, yes. But he will not lose me. He needs me. And I need the playing.’

Harlequin stopped centre stage, facing a vast audience he conjured out of nowhere, and gave one of his magnificent bows, sweeping his cloak before him. Sneaking the words backward under his arm, hiding them from the cheering crowd, he whispered, ‘Understand this, Mina, the show must go on!’

Mina looked out at the audience he’d conjured. But it was an audience of ghosts, with white skin and bruised, empty eyes. She saw the girl from Clusone, Katriela, standing near the front. And she knew. Suddenly she knew what she would find when she reached Paolo. She knew the child, somewhere in the village where they’d been attacked, was a shadow of himself.

‘You take their spirit from them!’ she cried. ‘When you break the threads they become lost, hopeless! You don’t just steal their dreams. You steal their ability to dream.’

Harlequin stopped cavorting, this time leaning over Mina’s shoulder from behind. ‘The show must go on.’ He giggled. ‘I must go on!’

‘No!’ Mina shouted again. ‘You’re hurting people.’

But Harlequin wasn’t to be tamed. ‘Sometimes we must,’ he retorted, and was gone again, flickering around the ocean, rocked by its perpetual motion. He began to pirouette, spinning just faster than the edges of possibility.

‘Even children?’ Mina asked quietly.

Like a dying top, Harlequin lost momentum, slowing to a final spin directly in front of Mina. ‘No,’ he said, and his eyes were steady and blue. He reached his hand up to his mask.

In that frozen instant a storm gathered. Black clouds boiled up from the ocean, drawing together in an unspeakable rush, forming a potent shadow that rose up behind Harlequin, growing larger and larger. As the clouds became one crawling mass they took shape, forming a bat, featureless but menacing. Harlequin was lost within the shadow of its body as it loomed over Mina. It moved forward, its great wings beating slowly. Mina expected it to have no weight, formed as it was from insubstantial clouds, but she should have known Tarya better than that. Each movement of the wings created a chill wind that drove her backward. Darkness bled outwards from the bat, until all she could see was a giant midnight shape against a black world.