The Troupe (48 page)

“It’s claret,” he said. “Not a particularly good one, either.”

“As I told you,” said Silenus.

“Let me see that,” said the lady. She took the bottle and did the same, tasting a very tiny drop. “You are right,” she said. “I didn’t know you have such poor taste in wine.”

Silenus took it back, returned to his trunk, and took out a goblet.

“No,” said the lady suddenly.

He turned to her. “No?”

“No. Not your goblet. I cannot even trust your glassware, singer. We will give you one of ours.” She gestured, and a fairy stepped out of the wood with a small, ornate crystal glass.

Silenus took it, turning it over, and said, “Very fine work, this. If you wish.” Then he carelessly tossed his goblet over his shoulder. It broke on the rocky shore.

The lady stared at the broken glass, uncertain. Then she said, “Pour it so that we can see. I’m willing to treat you to this last luxury, but if I catch the slightest whiff of your tricks…”

“I have no tricks left,” said Silenus. “I know I will die today.”

He shut the trunk and sat down on the top. He was so close now that George could not bear the shame. “I’m so sorry, Harry!” he shouted.

Silenus looked at him with a questioning eyebrow.

“I… I knew what she was going to do,” he said. “Anne, or Franny, I mean. I thought… I didn’t trust how you were running the troupe, and I thought… I thought I hated you. I did. I’m so sorry, Father. I would’ve never been quiet if I’d known it could be like this. I’m so sorry.”

Silenus nodded as if he was only slightly disappointed. “Well. It isn’t your fault, kid. I did nothing to earn your trust or love. I find myself wishing for many things right now, but chief among them is
that I’d treated you better.” His eye moved to Colette. “And I’m sorry, Lettie. I never meant to hurt you.”

“She was right there,” said Colette. “Right there all along, and you still let me come to you?”

“I was weak,” he said. “I’d not known a woman’s touch in many years. You were my first love, after her. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all of you. I only hope you all get out of this.”

Then Colette, who rarely showed any emotion besides frustration or cold satisfaction, whimpered and burst into tears. Even in this moment of deep distress, George was surprised to see her cry.

“There, there,” said Silenus. He put down the crystal glass and reached toward her. She extended a hand, but before they could touch the seneschal angrily cleared his throat.

“Will you not let a man comfort a grieving woman, Ofelia?” Silenus said.

“This is getting very much out of hand,” said the lady, irritated. She shook a little, and said, “You may kiss her hand, but no more.”

Silenus nodded, and leaned over. Before he kissed her hand he breathed in deep, taking in her scent, and looked up her arm with eyes both fond and proud. “You gave me a quiet among lifetimes of war,” he said. “If anything means anything, that does.” With the barest touch of his lips he kissed one knuckle of her hand, and sat up straight. He moved the bottle of wine to the hand with the cork in it, holding the cork with his index finger and thumb and the neck of the bottle with the other three fingers, and picked up his crystal glass with his free hand. Just before he poured, he glanced up at Stanley. “You know what to do, don’t you?” he said.

If Stanley knew he made no sign. His fingers were digging into George’s shoulder, yet George could not feel anything but a kindred sense of sympathy: they were about to lose their leader, their father, contradictory and wayward as he was.

“Yeah,” said Silenus to Stanley. “You know what to do. I wish I had listened to you, you know. You were right.” He looked up and
around, smelling the night breeze, and smiled a little. “There is so much more to everything than this.”

Stanley nodded, and bowed his head.

Silenus began to pour the wine. “Ah,” he said. “The mere scent is almost enough for me.” And as he poured George swore he thought he saw something else fall into the glass, but it did not come from the bottle: it came from the cork, and it looked like just a drop of a very thin syrup, yet it was almost shielded from view by Silenus’s hand. George started when he saw it, and when he looked up he saw Silenus was staring at him very piercingly. Then his father offered the glass of wine to the sky, said, “Salut,” and drank.

Again, George expected something to happen. He’d put something in the wine, so surely this was some sort of plan of his… yet there were no effects at all. Silenus simply sat on the trunk when he was done, breathing out heavily, an old man wearing muddy shoes. Then he said in a small and frightened voice, “I am going to die today.”

“Yes,” said Ofelia. “You are. Will you be so cowardly as to run from us?”

“No. No, I will not run,” he said, and stood. “But if you are to have me killed, I will at least have the dignity to die before my killer.”

“You are out of privileges,” she said coldly. “That is one I will not give you.” She nodded to several of the fairies, and they marched forward bearing stout clubs in their hands.

Silenus sniffed, tossed the glass over his shoulder, straightened his tie, and calmly began walking toward Ofelia. “I am going to die today,” he said again softly.

He walked toward the group of approaching assailants as if they were not there, eyes fixed on the lady. When the first club fell it struck him across the brow, and blood fanned through the air. Colette cried out, and Silenus spun a little, staggered, but put down another foot to resume walking. Yet then another club fell, this one striking him on the shoulder, and then another on his neck, before one found the back of his knee. There was a pop and he groaned and twisted to the
ground, and at that the fairies dispersed a little, ringing him in, ready to watch him writhe.

But he did not. He swallowed, blood spurting from his brow and his knee wobbling horribly, and slowly pushed himself up, and resumed walking forward.

The fairies swooped back in again, and another club whistled down. He held up a hand and the club struck him on the wrist and again there was a pop. Silenus cried out and bent over, the glistening teeth of shattered bone protruding from the base of his hand. Then one fairy took a fistful of hair at the back of his head, steadied him, and brought his club down on the side of his face. Silenus crumpled, his eye ruined where his skull had given in to the blow, and he lay there with his face in the dirt. Colette cried out again, and even Stanley, who’d always been utterly silent, moaned in despair.

George wanted to look away. He felt sick with rage, and he wanted to dash forward and bowl the fairies over and rush his father away. But he knew he could not, and he hated himself for his powerlessness. Yet again he was but an audience member in his own life.

He expected Silenus to stay down now: he had taken a terrible injury. Yet again, his father did not. With a series of soft grunts and moans he pushed himself up with his good hand, his ruined one clutched under his armpit, and he again began half-limping, half-crawling over to the lady, blood streaming from his eye and his brow and his hand, and now there was a little stream running down his ankle as well.

The fairies again crowded around him. One jabbed up with his club into Silenus’s stomach and he jerked forward, gasping terribly, and went reeling off into another fairy. The fairy pushed him back and they pinned him in, shoving him around, toying with him. They landed blows upon his ribs, and one even grabbed his good arm and stretched it out and struck him on the elbow. His arm bent horribly, the elbow bending to the side with the sound of old wood being crushed, and he gagged and whimpered.

“Stop it, damn you!” sobbed Colette. “Just stop it!”

Stanley again moaned softly.

“Please stop,” whispered George. “Please stop walking. Just stop.”

Yet his father would not. Even with both arms broken he bent over and staggered along for another few feet. The fairies hesitated, dodging around him, searching for the next best blow.

“Put him down,” said the lady.

One of the fairies nodded and walked alongside him for a bit, matching his slow hobble. Silenus’s breath now came in wheezes and he walked bent like a cripple, face to the ground, determined to make a few more feet. The fairy reached out and took his coat and gently brought him to a stop. Then the club rose high and fell upon the back of Silenus’s head with a sickening crack. He collapsed in a heap and lay there, hardly breathing. Colette took George’s hand, and both felt sure he was dead.

But then, unbelievably, Silenus started to move again, crawling toward Ofelia, covered in blood and dust. Ofelia shook her head as if irritated by this last show of defiance.

“Why is he doing this?” asked Colette. “Why does he keep going?”

“Because the last walk is all that’s left,” said George. And when he said this Stanley hugged them both close, and though he held George the closest, George did not mind.

“Enough,” said the lady.

The fairy that had struck the final blow took out a knife, reached down, grasped Silenus’s hair, and pulled him up. Silenus’s one good eye rolled up to glare at the lady, and his broken hands sought purchase on the ground to try to pull himself forward more. But then the fairy took the knife, delicately placed it below the far corner of his jaw, and drew it along his neck.

The spray of blood was horrific. George and Colette wailed in shock, and Stanley began to shake. The fairy released Silenus and he fell back to the ground, blood pouring from the wound.

And yet, even in those last moments, with his life rushing out of him to spill onto the ground, Silenus still somehow managed to drag himself into a kneeling position using one shoulder for leverage, as if he just might summon the strength to push himself up and take one more step toward his goal, or even two or three. But his strength finally failed him. He fell forward onto his side, breath rattling and hands and legs trembling. After a few minutes he was still.

The lady nodded. “A good death. Not the best, but decent.”

“Are you happy now?” said George angrily through his tears. “Are you pleased with what you’ve done?”

“Happy?” she said. “I’ve not been happy for hundreds of years. But I will settle for satisfied. And yes, I am satisfied with this. It was about time one of his swindles caught up to him.” She gestured to several of her servants, and they gathered up Harry’s body and carried it away into the woods.

“What are you going to do with him?” asked George.

“He is an old thing, and probably scrawny,” she said. “So I believe we will soak him in the wine he loved so dearly before we make any real decisions about preparation.”

“God,” Colette said. “You people are
monsters
.”

“Time makes monsters of us all, and we have seen quite a bit of that,” she said. The white masks began to blink out again until much of the host had left, except the lady and a few of her servants.

“What will you do with us?” said George.

“You?” she said. “I will do nothing to you. I swore I would not harm you. And besides, that is not for me to decide.”

“Then who will?”

She turned around, searching the trees, her spidery fingers flexing contemplatively as she waited. Then she cried, “Ah! There they are.”

There was movement down the shore. Some people were walking toward them, but their movements were slow and ungainly, as if their legs did not fully work. When a flash of moonlight was reflected off the waves, George caught a glimpse of their faces and gasped. “Oh, no.”

“What?” said Colette. “What is it?” And Stanley, who of course could not write anything with his hands on their shoulders, looked at him curiously.

“Don’t you see them?” said George. “She’s brought them right back to us…”

The figures trooped up the shore and made a line in front of them, and they saw that the faces of the figures were their very own: there was Colette, and Stanley, and George, and the woman with the thin face and red hair who had once been Annie, and there on the right was the shadowy person who could only be Silenus. They stood still for a moment, and then they seemed to collapse inward, crumbling at the shoulders. When the wind rose their skin and clothes blew away like leaves, revealing a frame of vines and sticks and mud.

“The botkines,” said Colette. “But that can only mean…”

George gasped again. A blast of crushing silence rolled across the shore to him like a foul wind. He sank to his knees. “No,” he whispered. “They followed them. They’re coming…”

“Yes,” said Ofelia, pleased. “They most certainly are.”

George raised his watering eyes and saw a parade of figures in gray suits streaming down the shore to them. There were so many there, lined up with their blank faces and their small smiles, that it hurt the eye to look at them. The men in gray fanned out around the three of them as they approached, dozens, hundreds, thousands more than the fairies. Light faded and the air grew still, and soon it felt like George had to fight for every breath.

One of the men in gray looked at George, Colette, and Stanley. Then he turned to the lady. “He is dead? You have killed Silenus?”

“He is very dead,” she said. “And soon he will be even less than that.”

“And they have the Light with them?” he said.

“That is not my area of expertise,” she answered. “I do not play those games. They bore me so.”

He stared at her, eyes unmoving. George was not sure who was more unfathomable: the fairies or the men in gray.

“I trust,” she said, “that this does not violate our arrangement?”

Still he did not answer.

“Everything remains the same,” she said. She sounded more than a little nervous. “You will now be allowed to swallow what is left of the world, leaving only the choicest and most desirable lands for us to enjoy in one last celebration before the very end. Correct?”

“That’s what you did this for?” said Colette. “A fucking
party
?”

“Not just any party,” she said mildly. “
The
party. The
last
party. A solstice party unlike any other. We will eat and drink things never tasted before in all of existence. Who would deny themselves such rare treasures? And what a good way to pass the eve of this world.”