Egyptia was stricken.
“Why are you laughing at me?”
“Because, in the middle of utter chaos—you’re so beautiful!”
She stood there, her skin like a warm peach with an overall theatrical makeup, her eyelids terracotta and golden spangles, gold spangles also massed thickly on her breasts, which otherwise appeared to be bare. Her hair had been streaked with pale blue, and tortured into long elaborate ringlets, and she had a little gold crown on it. She had a skirt of alternating gold and silver scales, and on her flexible arms were dark blue clockwork snakes with ruby eyes, that continuously coiled round and round.
What was most laughable of all was that, as she stood facing me in her costume, facing me through her terror and her ridiculous egomania, and her vulnerability, I sensed again the greatness in her that she sensed in herself. And I laughed more wildly and harder, until she, with offended puzzlement, began to laugh too.
Impatience, scorn and fondness, and love. Struck together like matches, igniting. Giggling helplessly, we fell onto a couch, and her layered scaled skirt made the noise of tin cans rolling down stairs, and we shrieked, our arms flailing, and her oriental slippers flying off across the salon.
* * *
There were three bottles of Slaumot and Clovis, Egyptia and I sat and drank them in the fire and candlelight. Jason and Medea drank coffipop, which, when I was fifteen, always gave me instant hiccups. The twins sat on the floor across the big room from us, playing a macabre version of chess Jason had invented. They might steal some of the pieces, but Egyptia wouldn’t care. She knew she wouldn’t live beyond this night. She had two visions of her death. One was when she first entered on the stage. Her heart would burst. Or she might die at the end, the strain having been too much for her. It wasn’t at all funny. She meant it, and she was scared. But, more than all else, she was scared of the fact that she was to dramatize Antektra before an audience. It wasn’t an enormous theatre, and it might not fill. A couple of critics might be there, and a visual crew would film a shot or so, as a matter of course, and then probably not show it. But to Egyptia, it was more than all this—which, if it had been me, would have terrified me sufficiently—although, far less than it would have done before my debut in the streets. It was her fear of failing herself that gnawed on Egyptia. Or, as she put it, of failing Antektra. She would say portions of her lines, pace about the salon, sink on the couch, laugh madly, weep—her dramatic makeup was genuinely tear-proof, fortunately. She sipped the Slaumot, and left butterfly wings of gilt from her lips on the glass.
“She’s a virgin. Her sexual electricity has turned in on itself. She is driven by grief, anguish and fury. She is haunted by the demons of her fury.” How odd she should sound so cognizant of these emotions which truly I don’t think she’d ever felt. And the descriptions of Antektra’s state, obviously footnotes, learnt off like her lines—”A whirlwind of passion. Am I capable of doing this? Sometimes I’ve felt that the power of this part is inside me, like a volcano. But now… Have I the strength?”
“Yes,” said Clovis.
“Yes,” I said.
“My rook tortures your rook to death,” said Jason across the room.
“The power,” said Egyptia, prowling like a leopardess between the candles, “may consume me. I don’t mind, I truly don’t mind if I die, if it kills me. So long as I can die with this task accomplished—Oh, Jane. You understand, don’t you?”
“Yes, Egyptia.”
Clovis yawned, hiding in his longer hair as he did so, and I thought of Silver. Not that I’d stopped thinking of Silver. When I was twelve, I had a psychosomatic toothache for months in one of my back teeth. I took painkillers every three hours, which dulled the pain but didn’t get rid of it. The nag of it went on and on, and so I got used to it, and only thought about it at the end of each three-hour unit when it would flare up to new violence. This was how I felt now. My awareness of danger and distress, my concern for Silver’s concern at my absence, the hopeless trap I was in and apparently couldn’t move out of—these were the dull pain. The wine, the familiarity, Egyptia’s fear were the painkillers. The pain was slight and bearable and I could almost put it from my mind. But then the light moved on Clovis’s hair—red—and the pain flared. I almost rushed, each time, from the apartment and away into the night. Clovis could surely contain the twins. But they would know they’d been right. And Clovis’s unspecified help would be lost to me.
He wore an embroidered shirt, too, under the silk and velour jacket. He was so rational about Silver, yet the copied influence was there. Could I trust Clovis? Well, I had trusted Clovis, if not with my address, with everything else.
“My queen buys her freedom by allowing your knight to cut off her left hand,” said Medea.
“I do hope,” said Clovis, “they’re not actually inflicting these injuries on your chess set, Egyptia.”
“The world’s a chess set,” said Egyptia. (A quote?) “Oh, bow your neck to the bloody dust. Kneel to the yoke, humiliated land. This is not the world. The gods are dead. Kneel, for you must. Relinquish pride, and kneel.”
“My knight castrates your knight.”
“He can’t. My knight’s in full armor.”
“Well. There’s a weak link.”