Liavek 6 Page 3

  By some paradoxical mirror-fluke of nature, those sensory impressions gleaned from the apparatus of the body's left side would be conveyed to the brain's right hemisphere. And there, due to the severing of the neural causeway that had connected both lobes, the information would remain. It would never reach those centers of cerebral activity that govern speech and communication, for they were situated in the left brain, a land now irretrievably lost beyond the surgically created chasm. Her eye would see, but her lips would know nothing of it. Conversation that her ear might gather would forever go unrepeated by a tongue ignorant of words it should shape.

  She would not be blinded, not exactly. Her hearing would remain, after a fashion, and she would even be able to speak. But she would be Silenced.

  Within the flattering opalescence of her white chamber, Mistress Ouish concluded her descriptions of the honors which awaited the stunned nine-year-old. She rang the tiny china bell that signaled Book to the room, terminating the audience. Stumbling over feet made suddenly too large by loss of circulation, Som-Som allowed the tattooed servant to lead her into the startling mundane daylight.

  Poised upon the threshold, Book had turned to the blinking child beside her and smiled. It wrinkled the words written upon her cheeks, rendering them briefly illegible, and it was not a cruel smile.

  "When you are Silenced and can reveal their conclusions to no one, I shall permit you to read all of my stories."

  Her voice was uneven of pitch, as if she had long been unpracticed in its application. Raising her ungloved and crimson-speckled hand she touched the calligraphy upon her forehead, and then, lowering it, lightly brushed the lyric spiral of her breast. Smiling once more, she turned and went inside the house, closing the white door behind her, an ambulatory pornography.

  It was the first time that Som-Som had ever heard her speak.

  The following day, Som-Som was escorted to an elusive residence where a man with a comb of white hair that had been varnished into a stiff dorsal fin running back across his skull gave her a tiny, brownish worm to chew. She noted that it was withered and ugly, but probably no more so than it had been in life. She placed it upon her tongue, because that was expected of her, and she began to chew.

  She awoke as two separate people, unspeaking strangers who shared the same skin without collaboration or conference. She was conveyed back to the House Without Clocks in a small cart lined with cushions. She rattled through the arched entranceway and across the gargantuan inkblot of the courtyard, and all that had been promised eventually came to pass.

  Twelve years ago.

  Seated upon her balcony, her half-visible lips stained blue by the juices of the masticated blossoms, Som-Som regarded the courtyard of the House Without Clocks. Unrippled by the afternoon breeze, the black pond stared back at her. Here and there upon the impenetrably dark water, fallen leaves were floating, motionless scraps of sepia against the blackness.

  Surely, if she were to topple forward with delicious slowness toward the midnight well beneath her, surely she would come to no harm? Dropping like a pebble, she would splash through the impassive jet of the surface, a tumbling commotion of silver in the cold, ebony waters surrounding her.

  Up above, the ripples would race outward like pulses of agony throbbing from a wound. They would break in black, lapping wavelets against the courtyard walls of the House Without Clocks, and then the waters would once more become as still as stone.

  Down below, kicking out with clean, unfaltering strokes, she would swim away beneath the ground, out below the curved walls of the House Without Clocks, out under the City of Luck itself and into those uncharted, solid oceans that lay beyond. Diving deep, she would glide among the glittering veins of ore, through the buried and forgotten strata. Darting upward, she would flicker and twist through the warm shallows of the topsoil, surfacing occasionally to leap in a shimmering arc through the sunlight, droplets of soil beading in the air about her. Resubmerging, she would strike out for the cool solitude of the clay and sandstone, far, far beneath her…

  Someone walked across the surface of the black water, wooden sandals scuffing audibly against its suddenly hardened substance, crunching through leaves that were quite dry. Unable to sustain itself before such contradictions, the illusion melted and was immediately beyond recall.

  One side of Som-Som's face clouded in annoyance at this intrusion upon her reverie, half her brow clenching into a petulant frown while the other half remained uncreased and indifferent. Her single visible eye, one from a pair of gems made more exquisite by the loss of its twin, glared down at the visitor passing beneath her. Unnoticed upon her balcony, she studied the interloper, struck suddenly by some quirk of gait or posture that seemed familiar. Her left eye squinted slightly as she strained for a better view, deforming the symmetry of her bisected face into a mirthless wink.

  The figure was slender and of medium height, swathed in gorgeous bandages of red silk from crown to ankle so that only the face, hands, and feet were left unwrapped. The delicate line of the shoulder and arm seemed unmistakably female, but there remained something masculine about the manner in which the torso joined with the narrow, angular hips. Walking unhurriedly across the courtyard, it paused before the pale yellow door that lay at the rightmost extremity of the House Without Clocks. There the figure hesitated, turning to survey the courtyard and giving Som-Som her first clear glimpse of a painted face at once strikingly alien and instantly recognizable.

  The visitor's name was Rawra Chin, and She was a man.

  During the years of her service within that drifting environment, her perceptions of the world limited both by her condition and by the virtual confinement that was its effective result, Som-Som had nonetheless contrived to reach a plateau of understanding, an internal vantage point overlooking the vast sphere of human activity from which the Broken Mask had excluded her. This perspective afforded her certain insights that were at once acute and peculiar.

  She understood, for example, that quite apart from being a limitless ocean of fortune, the world was also a churning maelstrom of sex. Establishments such as the House Without Clocks were islands within that current, where people were washed ashore by the tides of need and loneliness. Some would remain there forever, lodged upon the high-tide line. Most would be sucked away when the ebb of the waters came. Of these fragments reclaimed by the ocean, few would ever again reach land, and if they did it would not be in those latitudes.

  Rawra Chin, it seemed, was an exception.

  Som-Som remembered Her as a wide-boned and awkward boy of fourteen whose employment at the House Without Clocks had commenced when Som-Som was already in the fifth year of her service. Despite the flatness and breadth of Her face and the clumsiness of Her deportment, Rawra Chin had even then possessed some rare and indefinable essence of personality, animating the uneasy frame of the adolescent boy and lending Her a beauty that was disturbing in its effect.

  Mistress Ouish, long skilled in detecting that pearl of the remarkable that is concealed within the oyster of the ordinary, had noticed Rawra Chin's distinct yet elusive charm when she decided to employ the youth. So, too, did the clientele of the House Without Clocks, with numerous merchants, fishermen, and soldiers proclaiming Her their especial favorite, asking after Her whenever they should chance to visit that establishment.

  The common bond shared by all those who admired this charisma within Rawra Chin was that none of them could precisely identify it. It remained a mystery, concealed somewhere within the oddly disparate components of Her broad and starkly decorated face, hovering at some imaginary point of focus between Her hasty pencil-line of a mouth and Her widely-spaced eyes, overwhelmingly tangible, eternally ungraspable.

  Som-Som, one of two people within the House who came to know Rawra Chin closely, had always been inclined to the belief that Her charms originated in the emotional depths of the nervous and hesitant lad Herself, rather than in some fluke of physique or physiognomy.

  There was a restless
melancholy that seemed to inform everything from the boy's stance to the way She brushed Her hair, long and soft, so golden it was almost white. There was also the occasional icicle glitter of fear in those eyes that had too great a distance between them for prettiness but just enough for beauty. These disparate threads of personality were woven into a design that gave the overwhelming impression of vulnerability. As to the precise nature of that vulnerability, Som-Som had no more idea than the most brief and casual of Rawra Chin's adoring customers.

  Often, She had come to sit and drink tea with Som-Som upon her balcony to pass the time between engagements, a diversion popular with many of the inhabitants of the House Without Clocks. Due to the singularity of Som-Som's impairment, they could reveal their longings or resentments without fear. Rawra Chin had visited her often during the long, dull mornings, seeming to delight in the thin floral infusions and the opportunity for one-sided conversation.

  It seemed to Som-Som that she had contributed little to these often intimate discussions, having no confidences that she was able to share. Since the side of her brain that governed speech had known nothing but darkness and silence for several years, the best that it could offer conversationally was a string of inappropriate and disconnected fragments, half-remembered impressions and anecdotes relating to the world that Som-Som had known before the Silencing.

  Confusing matters further, Som-Som's verbal half could not hear and was forced to make interjections without knowing whether the other person had finished speaking. Thus, while Rawra Chin would be engaged in a vivid description of what She hoped to do once Her employment at the House Without Clocks was ended, Som-Som would startle Her by saying, "I remember that my mother was an unlikable woman who rushed everywhere to get her life over with the sooner," or something equally obscure, followed by a long silence during which she would stare politely at Rawra Chin and sip her floral infusion through the left corner of the mouth.

  Though at first disoriented by these random pronunciations, Rawra Chin grew accustomed to them, waiting until Som-Som had finished her non sequitur before resuming. The continuing presence of these bizarre ejaculations did not seem to lessen Rawra Chin's enjoyment of their conversational interludes. Som-Som supposed that her real contribution to these talks had been her simple presence.

  Her function was that of a receptacle for the aspirations and anxieties of others, although this fact never became oppressive. She enjoyed the exclusiveness of these glimpses into the way that ordinary life was conducted. The fact that people would relate to her things that went unvoiced even to their lovers gave Som-Som a perspective upon human nature more true and comprehensive than that enjoyed by many sages and philosophers.

  This gave her a measure of personal power, and she took pride in her ability to unravel the many and varied personas that presented themselves to her, laying bare the essential characteristics that were concealed beneath their facades of affectation and self-deception. Rawra Chin had been Som-Som's only failure. Like everyone else, she had been unable to give a name to that rare and precious element upon which the bewilderingly attractive adolescent boy had founded Her identity.

  On the other hand, Som-Som had been able to construct a relatively complete picture of Rawra Chin's aversions and ambitions, however superficial these appeared without an understanding of Her more fundamental motivations.

  Som-Som knew, for example, that Rawra Chin did not intend to make a lifetime's vocation of prostitution. While she had heard similar avowals from most of the occupants of the House Without Clocks, Som-Som sensed a determination in Rawra Chin that was iron-hard, setting Her appraisal of the future apart from the rather sad and much-thumbed fantasies of Her fellows.

  Rawra Chin, She often assured Som-Som, would one day be a great performer who would travel the globe, transporting Her art to the masses by way of a celebrated company of dramaticians such as the Torn Stocking Troupe, or Dimuk Paparian's Mnemonic Players. The less aesthetically demanding acts of pantomime that She was called upon to perform each day behind the pale yellow door of the House Without Clocks were merely a clumsy rehearsal for the innumerable thespian triumphs waiting somewhere in Her future.

  The pale yellow door gave access to that part of the house that was given over to romantic pursuits of a more theatrical nature, its four floors each housing a single specialist in the erotic arts, linked by a polished wooden staircase that zigzagged up outside the house from courtyard level toward the gray slate incline of the roof.

  In the topmost chamber lived Mopetel, the corpse-mime. Beneath her lived Loba Pak, whose flesh had a freakish consistency that enabled her to adjust her features into the semblance of almost any woman between the ages of fourteen and seventy. Rawra Chin lived upon the second floor, acting out mundane and unimaginative roles for Her eager male clientele but compensating for this with Her charisma. On the first floor, immediately beyond the pale yellow door, there lived a brilliant and savagely passionate male actor named Foral Yatt whose talent had been subverted into a plaything by the many female customers who enjoyed his company, and with whom Rawra Chin had become amorously entangled.

  Foral Yatt was the subject of a great number of those balcony conversations, conducted through the motionless fog of warm vapor that hung above their tea bowls, with Rawra Chin talking animatedly upon one side while Som-Som sat listening upon the other, breaking her silence intermittently to remark that she remembered the color of a quilt her grandmother had made for her when she was an infant, or that a brother whose name she could no longer call to mind had once knocked over the pot-boil and badly scalded his legs.

  The heart of Rawra Chin's anguish concerning Foral Yatt seemed to lie in Her knowledge that if She were to achieve Her ambition, She must leave the intense and darkly attractive young actor while She progressed to greater things. She confessed to Som-Som that though in private She and Foral Yatt would make their plans as if they would quit the House Without Clocks together, pursing parallel careers in the outside world, Rawra Chin knew that this was a fiction.

  Despite the fact that Foral Yatt's raw talent dwarfed Her own to insignificance, he possessed neither the indefinable appeal of Rawra Chin or the remorseless drive that would propel him through the pale yellow door and into the pitch and swell of that better life that lay beyond. Adding masochistically to Her anguish, the wide-faced boy also felt troubled by the fact that She was using Her nearness to Foral Yatt to study the finer points of his superior craft, storing each nuance of characterization, each breathtakingly understated gesture, until that point in Her career-to-come when She might use them.

  Having purged Herself for the moment of Her moral burden, Rawra Chin would sit and stare miserably at Som-Som, waiting for some acknowledgment of Her dilemma. Long moments would pass, measured in whatever units were appropriate within the House Without Clocks, until finally Som-Som would smile and say, "It was raining on the afternoon that I almost choked on a pebble," or "Her name was either Mur or Mar, and I think that she was my sister," after which Rawra Chin would finish Her tea and leave, feeling obscurely contented.

  Despite Her tormented writhings, Rawra Chin had eventually summoned sufficient strength of character or sufficient callousness to inform Foral Yatt that She would be leaving him, having been offered a place in a small but critically acclaimed touring company by a customer who transpired to be the merchant without whose continuing financial support the company could not survive.

  Som-Som could still remember the ugly playlet that the two estranged lovers had performed in the courtyard of the House on the morning that Rawra Chin was to leave. While the other inhabitants watched with boredom or amusement from their balconies, the players paced across the flat black stage, seemingly oblivious to the audience that watched from above as their angry accusals and sullen denials rang from the curving courtyard walls.

  Foral Yatt pathetically followed Rawra Chin around the courtyard, almost staggering beneath the weight of that dreadful, unexpected betrayal. He was a tall, l
ean man with beautiful arms, his eyes dark and deep set, brimming with tears as he trailed behind Rawra Chin, an unwanted satellite still trapped within Her orbit by the irresistible gravity of Her mystique. The fact that he kept his skull shaven to a close stubble to facilitate the numerous changes of wig required by his customers only added to his air of desolation.

  Rawra Chin remained a measured number of paces in front of him, occasionally directing some pained but dignified comment over Her shoulder while he ranted, incoherent with hurt, raging and confused. Som-Som suspected that She was in some oblique way enjoying this abuse from Her former lover, that She accepted his tirade as an inverted tribute to Her mesmeric influence over him.

  Eventually, when desperation had driven Foral Yatt beyond all considerations of dignity, he threatened to kill himself. Pulling something from the small pouch that he wore at his belt, the distraught young actor held it aloft so that it glittered in the morning sunlight.

  It was a miniature human skull, fashioned from green glass and holding no more than a mouthful of the clear, licorice-scented liquid that it had been designed to contain. No more than a mouthful was required. These suicidal trinkets could be purchased quite openly, and it was impossible to determine how many of Liavek's more pessimistically inclined citizens carried one of the death's-heads in anticipation of that day when life was no longer endurable.

  His voice ragged with emotion, Foral Yatt swore that he would not be deserted in so casual a manner. He promised to end his life if Rawra Chin did not pick up Her baggage and carry it back through the pale yellow door to their chambers.

  They stared at each other, and Som-Som had thought that she perceived a flicker of uncertainty dance across the widely-spaced eyes of the young boy as they moved from Foral Yatt's face to the skull-shaped bottle in his hand. The instant seemed to inflate into a massive balloon of silence, punctured by the sudden rattle of hooves and wheels from beyond the courtyard's arched entrance, signaling the arrival of the carriage that was to take Rawra Chin to join Her theater troupe. She darted one last glance at Foral Yatt and then, picking up Her baggage, turned and walked out through the archway.