Queen of the Night

  By Adrian Tchaikovsky

  First off, I need to explain to you just what the Peachpit Street Merchant Company was all about.

  This was before the war, before the words ‘merchant company’ conjured up nothing but a pack of artisans crammed into ill-fitting armour and pretending to be soldiers. We were singers, actors and musicians. We were, for the most part, also tradesmen, shopkeepers and the like, but we were performers as well. We weren’t exactly the Grand Siennis Ballet, but we had a determined little following from the residential and the mercantile districts about Peachpit Street, and we would sometimes tour a few of the tributary villages around Collegium, when we had a particularly good show on our hands. Once every couple of years our producer would secure us a booking in Sarn, perhaps, and we’d travel by rails and stay at some barren little Ant-kinden hostelry and do a few nights up there in the foreigners’ quarter, but we were a small company.

  Like any small company, though, we had big dreams.

  It started with the Annual Company Assembly, where those of us highest up on the steps of Art got together to see how much was in the money-jar and decide what we would do with it.

  Since Keyness Bounder was made producer, this almost always meant him dictating to us: each year a bolder production, each year a new trick to draw in the punters. Keyness was not a shopkeeper or a craftsman. Keyness Bounder had trained at the Aristarta in Seldis, and was an actor and theatre manager the whole day long, and a remarkable proportion of our take went to keep him in fancy-edged robes and fortified wine. Two years ago his command had been Banxawl’s For the Love of Two Doctors, with a real preserved cadaver from the College’s medical wing, and last year Keyness had tried to top that with Lysarea’s fiendish Phaladris, which some professionals would balk at, and our leading man risking his neck every night, leaping off the castle wall to his death whilst trying to hold a high note. Our success had been debatable, but Keyness Bounder was not in the least disheartened, and we could see in his face that he had something special this year for us.

  I should say who counts as ‘us’, the leading lights of the company. There was Sheppa, the little Fly costumier, and Madame Graspin, who owned both the Masque theatre and the taverna it backed onto. There was Eswell Broadwright, our perennial leading lady, whose length of tooth and width of waist had been noted last year when she played Cercera in Phaladris. There was a tedious old man who suffered under the moniker of Boswell Marwell and who, despite nothing about him being any more amusing than the name, generally scooped up any role with comic potential. He was a Master at the College, and so his continued involvement smoothed over a great deal of rough ground. Last, and least likely to have an opinion, was me, Miles Breakall. I don’t act. By day I run a little repair workshop off Peachpit, and in the evenings I tend stage, paint scenery and keep the company’s accounts.

  Keyness Bounder leant back in his chair, there in the private room of the Other Masque taverna. “Pathaea,” he said.

  It was a disappointment to my more artistically learned colleagues. They ridiculed it from the start.

  “Pathaea?” old Marwell scoffed. “That old rag? You could drive an automotive through the holes in that one.”

  “It’s just dreadful,” Eswell Broadwright agreed. “She’s so insipid.” As usual she was only interested in the quality of the female lead.

  “Too short,” Sheppa put in, concerned as usual with practicalities. “What do we double it with?”

  “And besides,” Marwell ground out, “You know our audiences. If they go to a opera called Pathaea they’ll want someone called Pathaea, and she doesn’t even feature in it.”

  “Yes she does,” Bounder said, quietly but with enough confidence to catch the ear.

  “I think you’ll find…,” said Marwell, working up to a good pontificate, but Bounder cut him off gleefully.

  “There’s a common misconception about the work, it’s true. There are whole essays on how a composer like Scriatha could produce such a rotten apple amongst all her classics. When I was at the Aristarta, though, I heard differently, so this spring I went off to Merro to track down the rumours. Yes, the version that we see here is frankly terrible, but that’s because it’s incomplete. Pathaea, as Scriatha wrote it, is a beautifully-constructed full-length opera in the old style, and a few years ago some clever Fly-kinden transcribed a complete score in modern notation, and I was able to secure a copy.” He looked inordinately pleased with himself.

  “And?” Marwell prompted. “Is it any good?”

  “What about that miserable little wet Eriphe?” Eswell pressed. “Has she a single piece worth singing?”

  “She does not,” Bounder admitted. “However, as far as a rewarding role for you, my dear, who do you think Pathaea is?”

  He had come prepared. He put three bundles of paper down on the table and let people paw over them. I peered over Sheppa’s shoulder. The music was dense, the printing not of the best. Sheppa leafed through it until I saw the name ‘Pathaea’ feature in the lines.

  Old Madame Graspin, our sour-faced landlady, made a “huh” sort of noise. “Good luck,”

  she told Eswell flatly, singling out one page of music. My grasp of notation is only good enough to follow the passing of the bars, but the others stared and even Eswell herself looked a little shaken. Still, she tossed her head and declared, “It shall stretch me,” in a fairly blithe tone of voice. As usual, there was no suggestion that she would actually have to do anything so coarse as audition.

  With that agreed, and any other business taken care of, we retired to the public room of the Other Masque to drink to the coming season. A few of the rest of the company breezed in and were told about the play, and we all drank up a lot of enthusiasm and confidence, so that we were toasting each other and the company with Graspin’s best wine and, of course, we toasted Pathaea.

  That was the first warning we had that we were about something particularly foolish. The Other Masque was only a few streets away from the College itself, but because of the theatre it had always catered to a mixed crowd. As long as I remember there was always a little coven of Moth-kinden that met there, who must have represented most of the Moths in Collegium. They came to the plays, as often as not, and so we got to know them, as much as Beetle-kinden can ever know one of their kind. They were shabby, scruffy creatures, exiled or self-exiled, scratching out a living on the periphery of Collegium society and yet somehow never quite going away. There was Velvet Lise the procurer, and a man named Voadros who I knew did conjuring tricks in the parlours of merchants for a living. There was old Doctor Nicrephos, who was a Master at the College but could not afford a robe without patches and darns. The man who came over to us, though, was Gravos, a small-time silk merchant and the most solvent of them. He didn’t look happy.

  “What are you blathering on about?” he demanded. He was tall, for a Moth, all angles, with high cheekbones in his grey face. His eyes, blank white as Moth eyes always are, were narrowed.

  “Our new production,” Bounder toasted him, “the lovely Pathaea.”

  “You Beetles have no idea,” Gravos said disgustedly. “Stick to what you know. Stick to Banxawl, or Latchey comedies. How about A Master of two Servants? It’s been at least four years since you did that one.”

  “No no, you mistake us,” Bounder insisted, solemnly drunk. “Pathaea. The full Pathaea, with added Pathaea.”

  It took a moment for the meaning to sink in, and Bounder had been loud enough that the other Moths had overheard as well. Then they were staring at him, eight white and featureless eyes just locked onto Bounder’s dark, wine-sweaty face. I thought they were angry, and then I thought they were about to burst into laughter, and then I realised that whatever they felt or thought, it wasn’t something I had any easy name for.

  “Whatever you say, Beetle,” was all Gravos came out with, at last, and then, “Be careful what you wish for.”

  “Full houses and full wine-bowls,” Bounder declared, and dismissed it all from his mind, as did we all, but it came back to us nonetheless, in time.

  A few tendays later we came to look over the score and cast the piece. We held a few desultory auditions, but we had done a lot of plays from around the time Scriatha was writing, and they all had the same kind of structure: there were lovers, there were villains, there were clowns and maids and supporting bit parts. We had a regular company and everyone had worn their own personal rut in the road of drama. In addition to that we had a few non-artistic considerations.

  For example, every few years we had to find a role for Madame Graspin, as a sop to the low rent we paid her, and then there was old Master Gafferow, our longtime and most generous patron, who would expect to see his son in some prominent and flattering role. Poor young Mosley Gafferow was a perfectly pleasant lad, and everyone was very fond of him, but no amount of coaching could much get past the fact that he was apparently made of wood. He could hold a tune well enough, certainly, but he couldn’t act. Still, Eswell made no complaints. She had no fear of him ever stealing the audience’s love from her, for all that she was twice his age. One unkind critic had said, of Phaladris, that she hadn’t realised that the title character was in love with his own mother.

  The script was in a bit of a mess, Fly-kinden draftsmanship and printing presses being what they are, but Bounder had sketched out a cast list for us to mull over. Boswell Marw

ell harrumphed and grumphed over that, because the last item was “Chorus of Beetle Slaves” which he said was in bad taste.

  “You can’t judge everything by modern standards,” Bounder told him genially. “A story set in Pathis-that-was is bound to have slaves. All our ancestors were slaves back then, remember?”

  Marwell’s dour expression suggested that, as the College Master, he was more used to giving than receiving lectures. Still, it was true enough that when our Collegium had been named Pathis, and when the Moth-kinden had been lords and ladies here, our forebears had presumably not had a good time of it. They taught that, a bit, but mostly they tended to start history off with the Revolution, and mumbled over the thousand years of servitude that preceded it. What did I care? I was an artificer. History before the machines came in was of limited interest to me.

  The old Pathaea that we, and greater Collegium, was familiar with was mostly your standard love story, only with a number of difficult bits where there’s no real sense to what’s going on. A Spider lordling (Teranis, tenor) arrives in Pathis and is rescued by the servants of Pathaea, who is a Moth magician of some kind. She wants him to rescue her daughter from another magician (Sarostros, baritone). He runs into a Beetle-kinden clown (Prater, comic baritone) who is sent to the evil magician’s lair to meet with the daughter (Eriphe, soprano).

  There are a series of escapades, and in the end Teranis is captured by Sarostros’ Mantis-kinden servant (Menamon, bass). However Sarostros dismisses Menamon and puts Teranis and Prater through a series of incomprehensible tests, which Prater fails in comic style. The last section is the most problematic one, because Eriphe tries to kill Sarostros for no reason, Menamon comes back from nowhere to fight Teranis, and then they all live happily every after except for the dead ones. Well, that was the version that we knew.

  The difference in Bounder’s score was that Pathaea, who doesn’t have the guts to show her face traditionally, actually turns up, adding a second, and rather meatier, soprano part to the proceedings. She only gets three scenes, mind, but when you stick her bits back in everything makes a vast amount more sense. It’s Pathaea who gives Eriphe the knife to kill her rival (and former lover) Sarostros, and it’s Pathaea who steals Menamon away into her own service and sets him on Teranis. At the very end, there’s a whole scene where she and Sarostros are having some kind of occult spat, and it’s up to Eriphe to stab her to save the day, and her lover. She’s the reason everything happens, you see, which is why the work was such a damp lamp after they took her out.

  None of us asked why they took her out. We were all too sold on Bounder’s idea.

  In the middle, after handing out knives and bewitching Mantids, she has this piece to sing, what they call an aria. It was the one that Graspin had picked out earlier, and now Bounder was looking over it worriedly. “My dear,” he murmured to Eswell, “whilst I have no worries whatsoever as to your ability…” but then he tailed off, seeing the look she was giving him. It was clear that, if the Peachpit Street Merchant Company was performing Pathaea, then so was Eswell Broadwright.

  The rest of the parts were disposed of without much reference to the actual cast. Bounder would take Sarostros, and we would shoehorn poor wooden Mosley Gafferow into the Spider-kinden shoes of the Aristos Teranis because otherwise the rent wouldn’t get paid. Boswell would take the clownish Prater, and drain the role of humour as a mosquito drains a man of blood.

  There was a bit of discussion about who, if Eswell was taking the plum title role, would actually do the miserable part of Eriphe, and it was agreed that it would be offered to one of our Fly-kinden, Fratte, who usually specialised in maids and understudies, because she had a pleasingly clear, high voice, and because it was probably her turn. There were three Moth-kinden functionaries who were parcelled out to reliable third-stringers, and after some deliberation the role of Menamon the Mantis was given to a relative newcomer, a renegade Tarkesh Ant-kinden, because he was pale-skinned and quite lean, and it was felt he would look the part, whatever his voice was like. Also, as an Ant, we thought he would make the fight with Teranis look good even if Mosley Gafferow just stood there. How little we knew, how little we suspected.

  We got most of the company together a tenday after, having printed off enough scores for the leads. Everyone not cast got to be a Chorus of Beetle slaves, and Sheppa the costumier was busy asking people to bring in any torn or damaged clothes to be converted into slavish rags.

  Eswell had decided that she would wear the gold dress that she had donned for Lysperrae the Tyrant five years ago, meaning that poor Sheppa would have to go shopping for several yards more of the expensive material. Meanwhile some of her numberless female relatives discussed amongst themselves just what combination of pale make-up would give Bounder and the others a complexion even slightly approaching the grey of Moth-kinden.

  Whilst everyone pored over the scores, and a couple of our regular musicians discussed what other instruments we’d need to hire in to do it justice, Eswell was backstage working ostentatiously on her big aria. It was, to be frank, something of a painful distraction. I wouldn’t say anything against her voice. She had a fine timbre that would have cut stone at twenty paces, and normally she got the music to agree with her by sheer volume and force of personality.

  Pathaea was not behaving, though. She stopped and started, started and stopped, breaking off mid-line, mid-note. The aria was something of an order of magnitude grander than anything she had attempted before, and the pitch-! I don’t know whether poor Eswell had ever got within reach of that top note on her best day. It didn’t stop her battering away at it, though, and woe betide anyone who dared pass a comment. The rest of us got on with what we could, and Bounder called me over to discuss the staging.

  “There are about six different locations,” he told me, “so I want some flats on revolves.

  No long changes, we learned that one after The Merchant of Merro.” He was right at that. By the time the Aristoi Palace at Seldis had made the stage, half the audience had gone.

  “Also,” Bounder went on, “I want something special for Pathaea’s entrance. She’s a Moth. She won’t just stomp on. I want Eswell in the hoist, coming down from the rafters. It’ll be magnificent.”

  “I’ll reinforce the hoist,” was all I said to that. Our three Fly-kinden, Sheppa, quiet Fratte and a leery little man called Villo, were in barely-suppressed stitches of laughter at my elbow.

  We had a good few tendays of rehearsals after that, mostly because Bounder was being uncharacteristically diplomatic and steering well clear of the problem areas – which meant anything involving Eswell. She was always there, of course, at every rehearsal, whether she was called or not. She had commandeered the dressing room and, while everyone else slouched about the stalls, we could hear her warble and bleat through three walls. The other parts of the opera, mostly those parts that had survived into the standard version, were going quite smoothly. The three Moth-kinden functionaries had a tendancy to lark it up during their scenes, and the fact that one of them, Villo, was half the size of the other two, would cause comment on the night.

  Boswell declaimed and posed his way through his lines, demolishing two centuries of careful Spider-kinden humour, and put in a great deal of dragging business of his own over which he and Bounder almost came to blows. Mosley was dutiful, polite, punctual and utterly uninspired, and across from him, Fratte’s Eriphe always looked as though she was about to cry. However, as Mosley was used to playing across from Eswell, at least this time he would have a leading lady who was both shorter and more slender than he. The big surprise was our Menamon, the Ant in Mantids’ clothing. He was called Rannus or Rannius or something, but by the time he got to us he was just Ran, and he was expressionless and quiet and very still, only the last of which is much use on stage. He was also the only Ant we had ever got at the company, and nobody quite knew what to expect. However, his voice, which had been a bit croaky on audition, filled out beautifully with a little instruction from Bounder, and he turned out to be quite the find.

  Anyway, we were doing a scene from the first act when it happened: Marwell, as Prater, was droning and bumbling about in Sarostros’ court, whilst Fratte did her best to look attentive, and one of our musicians sat with a harp waiting to pick out the skeleton of their duet. In the background we could hear, and manfully try to ignore, the strained blarts of Eswell trying to follow her aria those last few notes to where it was waiting for her on its lofty peak. She almost had it, that one time, or so my memory tells me, just teetering, tooth-jarringly a half-tone away.

 

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