fact you had best learn quickly. Now, if you will excuse me.' He gave little Mira a kiss on the cheek and handed her back to her father. 'Tess. Niko.' He gathered his party back together swiftly and with the single-minded purpose characteristic of him. He did not look toward Vasil again, and they rode away, back toward the army streaming past on the plains below.
Arina mounted. So did Anton. With a lift of her chin, Arina signaled something unspoken but understood to her husband, and Kirill took the rest of the party aside, leaving the cousins together.
'Vasil,' Arina started, and lapsed into silence.
'You have honored me with your trust,' Vasil began. 'I will never betray you.'
Anton sighed. 'Won't you, Vasil? I almost believe you.'
Arina looked out at the party of riders approaching the army beyond. 'Vasil.' Her expression was pained but hopeful. 'I was too young, really, to know much of what went on… before… between you and Bakhtiian. But you must see that whatever power you may have had over him, whatever feelings he may once have had-well, this isn't anything that ought to be spoken of, as you well know.''
'Do go on,' said Vasil softly.
'The past is gone, Vasil. You can't recapture it.' Anton, too, stared out at the army. 'Look at that, out there, and you can see. We have another destiny now. Don't try to interfere with it. We can only protect you so far. Beyond that-'
'Beyond that, Vasil,' said Arina firmly, sounding very much the etsana, 'Bakhtiian will not hesitate to kill you if you make him angry again. That he has not done so now is only because of his respect for Anton and me. Do you understand?'
'I understand.'
'Good. Then come, Anton. Vasil. We have much to do.'
She rode away, and Anton followed her. But Vasil lingered, watching as Bakhtiian's party mingled in with the vanguard of Bakhtiian's army. 'I understand very well,' he said to himself. 'I understand that Ilya is afraid of me. And that gives me hope.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
'No,' said Owen. 'I want more curve in the arms. Both arms. Higher. The gesture represents exultation with yet a hint of supplication. There. Hold that.'
Diana thought her arms were going to drop off. She could not keep her mind on the rehearsal. Endless hours jolting along in the back of the wagons as the army moved south, and then not even the comfort of any company that she craved at the end. She was surprised, each evening, at how bitterly she missed Anatoly. She was sick of the company of the other actors, except for Gwyn, but he was usually off watching the natives. He was learning khush quickly, and making himself known and liked, and slowly but surely he incorporated bits of gesture, bits of speech, asides into his acting that blended with Owen's vision and yet always, in their impromptu and brief performances every evening, got the most reaction from the audience that gathered to watch them.
'Now, the expression. That's good, but more of a blankness, Diana.'
'That shouldn't be hard,' said Anahita in a stage whisper. Hyacinth giggled.
'Smooth the lines of the mouth.' As always, Owen worked on, ignoring the comment. Perhaps he didn't even hear it. He fell so far into his work that Diana wondered if he ever thought or talked about anything else, but she had never had the nerve to ask Ginny if that was so.
'You're not with me, Diana,' he added chidingly. She hurriedly fixed her thoughts on her mouth, on the droop of her eyelids, on the exact tilt of her chin, and on her arms, lifting toward the heavens.
'Yes! Now hold it.'
Her heart bounded, uplifted by his single word of praise. It was for this, and for those moments when the ensemble work went seamlessly, when the house was gripped by the spell and the barriers between audience and players dissolved completely, that Diana worked and lived.
'Gwyn, enter. Good, but I want more movement in the shoulders. Yes, there's the gesture.'
Since Diana still faced forward with her eyes lifted toward the cloudy sky, she could not watch Gwyn go into his mie. Drops of rain wet her face. Anahita sneezed and began to complain about staying out in such bad weather. If Owen noticed the onset of the drizzle, he gave no sign of it. Diana's arms ached. She shifted her gaze down from the thick clouds to her fingers, and set about memorizing the exact angle and line of each individual digit. Ten of them, one for each day they had been traveling. One for each day since her husband-the word was less strange now than it had been before-had left her.
'Phillippe,' said Owen, 'the drum beats. Wind demons, your entrance.'
The rain fell in double time to the drumbeats. Diana stood so still that she could practically feel each point, each moment, that a drop of rain struck her bare skin. Hyacinth and Quinn, the wind demons, prowled about her and Gwyn, moving in a sinuous, threatening line.
Owen clapped his hands together twice. 'Break.'
Yomi said, 'You have one hour. Meet back here.'
'Yomi, we'll need light. Joseph, can you rig an awning over the stage?' Owen fell into an intense conversation with Joseph about shifting the placement of the various tents.
Diana shook out her arms and hopped down from the platform. At the edge of the encampment, about forty children had clustered together to watch the rehearsal. Now that it was over, they raced away into the jaran camp. Late afternoon faded toward dusk.
'I don't want to attempt Tamburlaine yet,' Owen was saying to Ginny and Yomi. 'We can't know if it will offend.'
'And Marlowe is so damn talky,' said Ginny, 'especially if you don't know the language. Certainly the verbiage will lose a great deal in the translation.'
'I'm thinking Caucasian Chalk Circle. But after we present the folktale.'
'Owen,' broke in Anahita, who like the rest of the actors had been eavesdropping, 'you can't expect us to put up something this new on so little rehearsal?''
'Of course I can. If you wanted safety, Anahita, then why did you come on this trip? I asked Tess Soerensen specifically for a jaran folktale that we might render into a gest and so make it clear to our audience what we mean by our acting. I am still of two minds about the performance of Dream. Did it indeed connect? Or were they simply being polite and curious? Certainly they were closest to us for the epilogue, when we drew the parallel from the play into the actual wedding and thus linked the two. But it's by no means clear to me yet even with our impromptus and scenes that they understand what we mean to convey with our craft. What we do here is rather more ephemeral, it seems to me, than their epic singers, who perform a tale over and over again in the same fashion.'
'Do you really think it's that different?' asked Gwyn. 'Or just different because it's not a medium they communicate by? Anyway, once rehearsal is over, we perform a play the same way every night. That's no different than their epic tales. I like it when we take chances, like this folktale.'
'Owen,' said Ginny, 'I'll finish the cuts on Caucasian this evening and then you can see how much physical business you want to substitute for what's left.'
'I don't see why we're doing Caucasian,' said Anahita, making a great physical business of showing her disgust with an overblown sigh and a toss of her curly black hair.
Gwyn winked at Diana.
'The deeply rooted feelings of mother and child, Anahita,' said Owen. 'Surely that will connect. Now, Yomi, about the-'
'I've got dinner for anybody who wants it,' said Joseph, pitching his voice to carry over Owen's. 'Hal and Oriana, could you hurry it up and then help me rig this awning?'
The company dispersed. Ginny dragged Owen along toward the big tent, where the food was, although she did not attempt to interrupt his conversation with Yomi. Diana lingered. She rubbed her hands over her arms to dispel the last of the ache but mostly to warm herself. The army had marched into the hills here, and the elevation brought cold nights.
