Guardian Page 14

  That said, should all the new segregation laws pass, Nbeki would likely find itself packed with blacks forced to move away from the center and east of the city outside Old Town. The outnumbered whites might well abandon their old class allegiances with their Mahweni neighbors and—if they had the money—move into the leafier and more desirable residences Richter’s law had opened up to them. Willinghouse had held forth on the subject many times. “Division and conquest along lines of race instead of income,” he called it. “The most insidious of the Heritage party’s stratagems.”

  For now it retained its patchwork culture. Trim northern churches with steeples side by side with the blue minarets of Bashtara Koresh, ancient Mahweni ancestral shrines, and vibrant Lani temples. One store sold pickled fish, sheep cheese, and white bread, while the one beside it sold five different kinds of rice and would grind fresh spices while you waited. The one next to that was a Baswan butcher, its hooks hanging with goat and antelope flesh, the owner sitting cross-legged on a cushion, puffing on a water pipe. During the day, the narrow, cobbled streets were quiet, but when the factories let out, Nbeki turned into a place of music and food and raucous conversation. It was, I supposed, as good a place for a circus as any.

  Dahria was less convinced.

  We took the underground to Great Orphan Street via Atembe at six o’clock, riding in a first-class carriage, perhaps to maintain a sense of decency for as long as possible. I wore the maid’s outfit I had patched together at the town house, and Dahria had opted—at my insistence—for the plainest and most ordinary frock she possessed. We had enough on our plate without her announcing her wealth to every footpad in the borough. She had a twin-shot pistol in her purse, though I had told her it should stay there unless her life was in real jeopardy.

  “I am going to a circus in Nbeki with a steeplejack,” she muttered dryly. “I don’t have enough bullets.”

  “Best not shoot them, then,” I replied.

  She had insisted upon coming and then complained about every detail of the trip. She had spent much of the day trying to get an audience with either her brother or with the police commissioner who had undertaken the investigation of the prime minister’s murder himself, but she had been shut out at every turn. As a society lady, she was accustomed to getting what she wanted, and if wealth and status didn’t solve matters to her liking, her brother’s name usually did. It was one of the painful ironies of her present situation that that particular trump card made it categorically certain that she would not get her wishes. In other circumstances, I might have thought the lesson useful.

  As it was, I pitied her, not just for her anxiety, but for her guilt. I saw our earlier conversation in her face every time she looked at me, the shame that she had doubted her brother’s political motives. She didn’t say it, but I felt it keenly: a sense that—at least in her mind—she had, by indulging her familiar and comfortable cynicism, misjudged Willinghouse, betrayed him, even. It was a fact, of course, that nothing that had happened had actually proved her skepticism wrong, but her brother’s being laid low, abandoned by his party—who seemed to want nothing to do with him in case he turned out to be guilty—had jolted her out of her former complacency. The brother whose principles and high-mindedness she had always mocked had, in falling from his public pedestal, somehow stepped up to another in her heart.

  None of this made her any happier about attending “a low entertainment in some squalid tent surrounded by pickpockets, cutthroats, and foreigners.” Or so she said. In fact, in any other circumstance, I think she would have secretly delighted in this taboo excursion far from the fashionable emporia, coffeehouses, and music rooms of Bar-Selehm’s society districts.

  The park was located between the complex of alleys known as the Sparrow Islands and the shambles, which stank of animal blood day and night all through the summer. It was usually a brown, grassless area with wilting, water-starved trees, which turned to ankle-deep mud after a downpour, a place of bonfires and refuse, jackals and carrion birds. Homeless people slept under the trees, their mangy dogs on ropes, at least until the coppers came and moved them on.

  Not now. Nbeki Park was transformed. We could hear it a block away—rolling music from a crazed hurdy-gurdy or pipe organ, barkers, their voices amplified by bullhorns, bells, cymbals, and drums, plus the cheers and laughter of a great crowd of people, all rising above the drone of steam engines. The area was wreathed in fragrant smoke like the incense that pencils the air around a temple, and among the scents of sandalwood and jasmine hovered the mouthwatering tang of roasted meat. Closer, you could taste the edge of the coal smoke and metal in the air, the slightly fetid aroma of bodies, animal droppings, and rotten fruit, which the incense couldn’t mask completely. It smelled of life and danger, of strange, exotic things that would thrill and delight and horrify. I caught Dahria’s eye, and a half smile flickered around her lips before being hastily doused, though she couldn’t hide the spark in her eyes.

  The circus had come into town by train and had, according to what Sureyna had told me earlier that afternoon, taken two days to set up. There were half a dozen tents on each side of the square and twice as many caravans, all hung with glass and ribbon and bells. Many of these looked like the living quarters of the workers and their families. Others sold food, drink, and trinkets, while some hosted games of skill and chance, sideshows, fortune-tellers, snake charmers, and miniature zoos, all fronted by outlandishly dressed hawkers advertising the strangeness and rarity of their offerings. It was like stepping into another country, romantic and a little bit frightening. All around, brightly colored signs directed us to the “Big Top,” the garish red and gold tent in the center, which dwarfed all the other structures in scale and magnificence.

  It was round, near enough, and impossible to ignore. I had scanned the various sideshows with their magic tricks, fire breathers, and puppet shows, but had seen nothing that involved climbing. With a thrill of foreboding, we paid a handful of pennies and went inside.

  “Colored section over there,” said the white ticket boy to me.

  I hesitated. There were provisions in the theaters, orchestra, and opera house for nonwhite servants to sit with their masters and mistresses, but in lower entertainment, no exceptions were made to city ordinances. The music halls went so far as to have “blacks only” shows, but that could also get them into trouble for, if you can believe it, discrimination. “Whites only” shows had no such problems.

  “She’s with me,” said Dahria with an imperial stare, so that the boy faltered.

  “Not up to me,” he managed. “It’s the law, ain’t it?”

  “I believe the matter is at the discretion of the individual venue,” said Dahria.

  “There you are, then,” said the boy, thinking this let him off the hook.

  “Exactly. So she will be sitting with me.”

  Realizing this forced him to take responsibility for defying her, the boy looked wildly around for someone who outranked him. When no one presented themselves and Dahria continued to stare in that way of hers that could make marble statues want to crawl away, he sputtered, “Well, all right. But if anyone complains, she’s out.”

  “We will meet that eventuality should it arise,” Dahria replied, not giving an inch. She gave me a half look, but her next words were clearly meant for him. “How the lower orders love to vaunt their status! I wonder if ants and worms are so carefully authoritarian?” She stalked past him, and I hurried in her wake, torn between amusement and irritation.

  There was seating on tiered wooden benches on all sides of the central ring but the back. It was stuffy inside, dim except for the stage, which was lit with torchlight that gave a smoky quality to the sawdust- and animal-scented air. I felt like I was entering the temple of some strange, mystic sect to watch a sacrifice. The crowd, like the region, was mixed and raucous. Though I glimpsed a little cadre of gentlemen and their well-dressed ladies slumming it with a pair of dragoons for escort, Dahria’s dull finery outranked
everyone else’s; even my maid’s attire put me socially even with the bulk of the audience. As showtime approached, I felt a rising sense of anticipation, which listed into anxiety, though I could not be sure why beyond the obvious. We were out of our element, both of us, and in a place frequented—if we were right—by killers who would surely know who we were.

  I wished Dahria had selected a more face-concealing hat: something with a veil, perhaps …

  Suddenly, there was a burst of applause and a roar from the crowd as a pair of curtains parted on each side of stage, new torches leapt into flame, and an unseen brass band burst into strident life. A pair of marble-white horses pranced into the ring, ridden by what looked like Lani women arrayed in gold and sprouting broad wings from their shoulder blades. The brown of their skin had a curiously orange hue, which made them strange, radiant in the torchlight, and the feathers of their wings had been treated with silver bright as chrome, so that they looked like figures from ancient scroll paintings of angels.

  The crowd gasped, and their simple pleasure at the spectacle was interwoven with something like awe, as more and more resplendent and curious figures joined the parade. In addition to the horses, there were orleks, a troupe of clothed monkeys—one with a comic suitcase—and an ebony goddess wearing little more than spangles, holding a pair of black weancats on leashes. Even the orleks were exotic, being not the usual black-and-white-striped variety but what they called Wilderheld orleks, whose paler parts were a strange blue-gray.

  There were red-skinned acrobats and jugglers, a fire breather, and a strong man who wore close-fitting blue robes. More horsemen—some of them shooting rifles and pistols, which they spun improbably from hand to hand. A stream of mongooses followed each other single file, leaping through hoops. Last came an elephant with an austere-looking man staring us down from its back.

  He was the only categorically white man in the company, but he retained the curious foreignness of the rest. He wore riding boots, jodhpurs, and a braided military-looking jacket over a bare, muscled chest, and as the rest completed their laps of the ring and filed out the back, he slid effortlessly down the elephant’s trunk and strode haughtily to the center of the stage. He bore a long coachman’s whip, which he cracked ceremoniously, and then stood with his arms akimbo, casting an imperious stare on the audience until they fell absolutely silent.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. I had expected a booming, autocratic showman’s voice, but while we heard every word with perfect clarity, he spoke softly, relying upon us to strain our ears. “Welcome to the traveling home of Messrs. Xeranti and their esteemed guests. You are most fortunate to be here, for tonight we will show you wonders!”

  You could feel the audience leaning forward in their seats, every eye fastened on the curious man with the unplaceable accent. It struck me that I had no idea where they were actually from. The Lani and black performers all seemed to be wearing extensive theatrical makeup and wigs, so that their true ethnicity was impossible to guess for sure. The circus people might all have been local, but they knew that part of their appeal came from seeming foreign and mysterious.

  And so it was. Every act was as much art as it was skill, and each had its own unfamiliar flavor, hinting at magical places far away. Each time the performance moved toward its climax, the audience was left openmouthed not by simple dexterity or cleverness but by something entirely unexpected that made the whole feel mystical, dreamlike. The pretty assistant had to be in the last box, but when that too was destroyed by the elephant’s crushing foot, she emerged smiling and unscathed from somewhere else. The scarred, blindfolded knife thrower did not just miss the lady spinning on the wheel, he cut the ropes that held her up so that she slid free just as the wheel itself burst into flames. Tricks seemed to go wrong, animals seemed to break loose, but all turned out to be just part of the act. Even the clowns—in yellow face paint with elongated, lizard smiles—were tricksters rather than buffoons, using sleight of hand and other misdirection techniques so that every joke seemed finally to be on us rather than them. It was mesmerizing and made you doubt your mind and senses.

  And then the trapeze artists came on, and I knew I was looking at a killer.

  He was small, maybe Tanish’s age or a little younger. His head was shaved, and his skin was painted a bilious green so that he looked like a water demon from some Mahweni folktale. He ran up the rope. There was no more suitable word, though my mind tried to reject it. He put one foot, pale with chalk dust, onto the knotted cord, seeming to grip it between his toes, and then raced up hand over hand, foot over sure, secure, and above all, rapid foot. He was at the top in less than three seconds, moving like a mongoose. I stared, gaping. I had been climbing most of my life, but I would not have believed that possible. In that moment, I realized I had seen enough.

  Dahria sensed my response and turned to look at me as the crowd applauded, but I was already leaving my seat.

  “What are you doing?” Dahria demanded.

  “Have to get backstage,” I said.

  “It’s the middle of the show, you mad creature! How do you think you are going to do that?”

  A fair question, but one I did not stay to answer.

  It was an occupational habit that when I was inside any structure for more than a few moments, I would find myself considering its highest reaches, imagining how I could get up there to perform cleaning or repair jobs, wondering about how much scaffold I’d need to erect, whether I was better approaching from the inside or the outside, where I could see ledges that were wide enough to stand on, moldings and other handholds that would bear my weight. I had done it in Parliament, I had done it in the opera house, and I had done it in churches and temples of every denomination in the city. So I had spent the moments before the circus began reflecting upon the big top from the perspective of those who had to erect it—tightening its many ropes and cables, securing necessary pegs high above where the audience now sat—and generally scrutinizing the physical architecture that kept the whole thing from coming crashing down and stifling all who weren’t crushed by the timbers.

  I had no plan, but I didn’t have to pause to consider my route. I couldn’t get backstage via the ring because everyone would see me, and the various exits were covered by toughs making sure no one snuck in without paying. I had no way of knowing how heavily they were guarding the stage door itself—or whatever you would call the equivalent in a huge tent—but I had seen enough expertly wielded guns and knives among the cast to know that any resistance at all might be lethal.

  I fought my way out of the row of spectators, all agog and gazing up to where the high-wire act had begun, and up the tiered aisle to the back of the big top. Instead of a single pole in the center, which would have taken up room in the performance ring itself, the tent was supported with six separate poles, each as thick as the trunk of a full-grown malbanta tree, and with the same naturally smooth surface. They were angled in toward the stage so that from outside the big top looked like a ring of a half dozen peaks. The poles were connected at the top, not just by high tensile cables, but by a series of rickety gantries from which lanterns hung around the stage. More importantly, from shoulder height, they were set with climbing spikes all the way to the top. Those tops had been quite visible before the show began, but now that the lantern height had been adjusted and some clever mirror devices were focusing them into the central area high above the ring, the gantries were so dim that they were almost invisible. If I could get up there in the shadows, I could use those gantries to get to one of the other pole stanchions that slanted down through the rear canvas and into the backstage area.

  As the crowd oohed and cheered the trapeze act, I looked quickly about and, when I saw no sign that the various guards and ushers had noticed me, slipped hurriedly out of my skirts and bonnet, revealing the close-fitting shirt, trousers, and work boots that were my steeplejack attire. Then I began to climb the rear pole. The “rungs,” which alternated to the right and left side of the po
le every few feet, were wooden dowels driven into the main spar and just long enough for a handhold. I was used to a vertical climb up walls and chimneys, so the angled ascent was disorienting, and I had to remind myself to keep my body central on the main shaft: too much swing as I climbed hand over hand, and I might lose my footing. Eyes front, I left the ground and the audience beneath me and scaled the sixty or so feet.

  I had been humbled by the way the boy climbed the rope, and I felt the urge to race up just to prove to myself that I was as good as him. It was a stupid impulse, especially on this unfamiliar, canted structure, and I bit it back, thinking of Madame Nahreem’s mask, pushing away any conflicted feelings about the lady herself, and focusing on the rhythm of the climb.

  At the top I made a cautious transfer onto the gantry, a wire and lattice affair not designed to handle a lot of weight. It shifted under my boots, and I took hold of the side cable to steady myself, looking down at the brightly lit performers and upturned audience faces through the smut of the torches. There were three performers out there in addition to the rope-climbing child, two men and a woman, though the youngest seemed to be the star of the act. They all had the same sickly green colored skin, which made them strangely reptilian as they performed their aerial acrobatics, swinging from one high platform to the other, throwing and catching each other to the gasps of the crowd. The catwalk on which I now squatted was some ten feet above the highest point of their elevated stages, but I felt sure that even in the gloom they would surely see me if they looked directly at me, so I kept very still and watched.