The Troupe (57 page)

“I held it in the palm of my hand,” he said. His voice was soft and creaky.

He opened his fingers. In his hand was a pocket watch. It looked like it had been recently polished, and it was cleanly clicking out the seconds. If the watch’s time was correct, it was just past five in the morning.

“I know that,” said Silenus. “That’s a family heirloom. How’d you get that?”

“I fixed it,” said George. He sat up more. “It will run all right now. For a while, at least.”

Silenus held George by the shoulders, steadying him. “George, what happened? Where is the song? Please, please don’t tell me it was lost with Stanley. Don’t tell me the wolves got it. Anything but that, George.”

“He saved it,” George said. “He gave it to me, just before he passed.”

“
You
have it?” said Silenus. He let out a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God.”

“He passed it on,” said George. He looked to his side at Stanley, pale and drawn and still. “From father to son, just like it’s always been.”

Silenus looked at him uncomfortably. “So… you know?”

“He told me, in his own way.”

“I… I don’t know what to say, George. I’m sorry. But we had to.”

George nodded.

“We were going to tell you eventually, when we thought you were ready. I’m sorry you had to find out just before… before he passed. He was dear to me, as I’m sure he… well, as he would have been to you. I’m so sorry, George. But the important thing is that the song is safe. It’s what he would have wanted, since that’s what he devoted his whole life to, and—”

“I don’t have the song,” said George.

Silenus stopped and stared at him. His face grew very pale. “You… you what?” he said.

“I don’t have it, Harry,” said George.

“But he gave it to you, didn’t he?”

“I used it,” he said. “I used all of it, Harry. I had almost all of the song, and the First Darkness came, and I had to use it to change… everything.”

Silenus began to tremble. “No…”

“I’m sorry, Harry,” said George.

“It’s gone? It’s really all gone?” he asked.

George nodded again.

“No. I don’t believe it. It can’t be
gone
,” said Silenus. “You can’t have just thrown it away! We had so much of it! We had almost all of it, George! I worked so
hard
to get everything! We were almost there!”

“We
were
there, Harry,” George said. “When Stanley gave it to me, I had nearly everything. The complete song.”

“You did?” said Silenus. “But what did you see? What did you see, when you had all of it? Did you see it? Did you see the… the Creator? Did you see anything? Can you at least tell me why?”

“Why what?”

“Why what?” shouted Silenus. “Why anything! Why all of it!”

George thought about it. He tried to speak several times but stopped before each one, not trusting his answer. Then he said, “I can’t say. I can’t say what I saw.”

“So you don’t know?” cried Silenus. “You don’t know!”

“No,” said George. And, strangely, he smiled, as if the thought pleased him. “I don’t know, Harry. I’ll never know.”

This answer gave no solace to Silenus, who grabbed his head with both hands and wailed. He stood up and staggered away several steps, and sat down on a stone and began to weep. Colette watched him, disturbed, but then George laid a hand on her arm.

“I’m very cold, Colette,” he said. “And I’m very tired.”

She gave Harry another wary look, but finally nodded. “I’ll get some kindling. It’s so wet here it’ll take me some time to find some, though.”

“That’s fine,” said George. “Thank you.”

She made to leave, but stopped. “What did you do, George?” she asked. “When the First Darkness came, what did you do?”

“What do you think I did?” he asked.

She looked around at the valley. She took a breath. The air was so much cleaner now. “You changed something, didn’t you? Everything feels so
new
.”

“Something like that,” said George. “I struck a bargain.”

“What sort of a bargain?” she asked.

“I figured out a way to break the darkness up forever,” he said. “To make the snake coiled around the world eat its own tail, so to speak. I threatened to make it do that, and it gave in.”

“What did you get in return?”

“Time,” he said. “Time for you, for me, for Harry. Time for everyone and everything. Everything will be left alone, just as it is, for a time.”

“How much time?”

He looked at her and slowly raised his eyebrows. Colette saw his eyes had faded to a very pale, peculiar shade of gray. But more than that there was something very deep behind George’s eyes, something that had not been there before. He had the eyes of someone who’d seen years and years of time. Centuries, even. Maybe more. “Do you really want to know?” he asked.

She opened her mouth, but then thought about it. “You know what, no,” she said. “No, I really don’t.”

He smiled a little, and nodded. “I think that’s very wise of you,” he said. Then he lay back down on the ground on his side, staring at his fallen father, and in his hand the pocket watch merrily pulsed along as if it had a great many seconds left to count out and it could not wait to get to them all.

Colette was right: it took her the better part of an hour to find dry ground. Once she did she began to search for the driest branches, and just when she had a decent bundle she was spattered with thick drops of rain. “Oh, great,” she said, and sought shelter under one of the tallest pines to wait it out. It did seem like a very peculiar storm, however: the dark clouds appeared to be making a straight line for the valley. Was it her imagination, or had that happened already today? It couldn’t happen a second time, could it?

The storm faded as quickly as it arrived, but before Colette ventured out she saw someone was stumbling through the underbrush. It appeared to be a girl in a bright green dress and with long, blond hair. She seemed to have come out of nowhere; Colette did not ever see her approach. The girl was apparently in some distress, as she kept attempting to charge forward, but the folds of her dress kept get
ting snagged on the grasping branches. When one tripped her and refused to let go, no matter how hard she tugged, the girl almost burst into tears.

“Here,” said Colette, stepping out from under the pine. “Let me help.”

The girl looked up, surprised, and stopped tugging. Colette laid her bundle aside and helped unwind the fabric of the girl’s dress from the pine branch. “There,” she said. “Probably not a good idea to wear such a fancy thing in these woods.”

“I know,” said the girl. “I didn’t think to change, I came here as fast as I could.”

“From where?” asked Colette.

The girl waved dismissively toward the west. “You’re the dancer, aren’t you?” she asked. “In his troupe?”

“His troupe?”

“Yes. George’s. The pianist.”

Colette helped the girl back to her feet. “I don’t know how you know George, but I don’t think there is a troupe anymore.”

She looked at her, frightened. “Then they’re… he’s…”

“George? He’s fine. Well, I don’t know. I think he is. Here, you can see him.” She led the girl to a small outcropping and pointed through the trees to where George lay.

The girl let out a great sigh when she saw him. “Thank goodness,” she said.

“He’s resting right now,” Colette told her. “He’s just been through a trial. And he just lost his father. So I think that for right now it’s best to let him be.”

“Oh… Oh, I’m so
sorry
. But is he going to be all right?”

Colette thought about it. “I’m not sure. But I think so. It feels like everything might be all right, for now.”

The girl nodded.

“You’re the one who helped him in Hayburn, aren’t you?” asked Colette. “The shepherd?”

“I’m his patron,” she said. “I sensed he was in trouble just a while ago and came running to help. He was there, and then he
wasn’t
. It was the strangest thing, but I couldn’t let him get hurt.”

“You do that for all the people who call you patron?”

“I am a patron to no one else,” said the girl, a little sadly.

“I see.”

“What happened here? I can almost always find George, but then he was gone… And then I felt like he was
everywhere
.”

“I don’t know what happened,” said Colette. “He did something, but I can’t say what just yet.” She watched the girl out of the side of her eye. She was staring at George with unabashed longing. “You’re kind of sweet on him, aren’t you?” she asked.

“What?” said the girl, startled. “Sweet? What do you mean? On who?”

“On George.”

The girl blushed magnificently. “Well, I would never… In fact, it’s unbecoming of a patron to…” Her blush intensified. “Well. Maybe not
that
unbecoming.”

Colette gave her a wry smile. “I see.”

The girl struggled for a moment, and finally said, “I feel very silly.”

“Don’t,” said Colette. She stooped and picked her kindling back up. “Here, walk with me. I can do you a favor.”

“You can?”

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll answer any questions you have about George, if you tell me something.”

“What would that be?” asked the girl as she followed Colette through the woods.

“Well, it’s like I said. I don’t think there’s going to be a troupe anymore. And you’ve been… How can I put this. You’re probably well traveled.”

“I have been in most places, at some point in time,” said the girl, a touch prideful.

“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” said Colette. “Do you know of any place where… where people would be willing to watch an entertainer like me?”

“Like you?”

“Yes. Like me.” Colette stopped and looked at her. “A colored.”

“Oh,” said the girl. She thought about it. “Well, I’m fairly sure I know of a few, right off the top of my head.”

“Interesting,” said Colette. “Come with me. I’d like to hear about those places.”

Once Colette came back and got a fire started Silenus finally returned to them. He had gone to his office door, which still stood open in the rock by the river, and fetched a large piece of canvas and shovels. “For Stanley,” he said.

George and Colette nodded. They laid Stanley in the canvas and all of them helped to stitch him up. George sometimes stopped and simply stared at the man lying within. When this happened Silenus or Colette took up his work without a word.

Once they were done they carried him up the valley to a hilltop. “I want him to see the sky,” George said.

All three of them helped to dig the grave. The ground was moist and parted easily for them. Then they laid him in the earth and placed stones over him and filled the grave in, and they made a marker for him out of branches. On it George carved:

STANLEY SILENUS

BELOVED FATHER

PATER OMNIPOTENS AETERNA DEUS

“Would you like to say something?” asked Silenus.

George shook his head.

“No?” asked Colette.

“He was my father,” he said. “All he wanted was for me to know what I was to him. And now I know. That’s enough.”

When they were done they returned to the fire. Silenus still shivered even though he was close to the flames, and eventually they realized he was not shivering due to the cold.

“I’m sorry, Harry,” said George.

Silenus simply stared into the fire.

“It was the only thing to do. It feels almost like the song was waiting for me to change it and use it all up. I’m not sure. I’m already forgetting parts of what happened. It’s like they’re too big for me to remember.”

“So we’ll never know,” said Silenus. “We’ll never know why. We’ll never be able to call the Creator back.” He looked up, and stared around at the dark riverbed. “And I’ll never be able to fix Annie. She was lost as well, wasn’t she?”

George nodded, his face sad.

“How? The symbols on her skin should have protected her…”

“Not against what happened,” George said. “I saw it, when I rebuilt everything.” He described what Annie had done, heaving the train car up the hill as it tore her apart, and then surrendering herself to the crushing tons of the breaking dam. “Even she could not survive that,” he said.

Silenus was quiet for a long time. As he stared into the fire he looked little and frightened.

“It was what she wanted, Harry,” said George. “She wanted to die. And she also wanted to help us. She did both.”

“If she could have only held on a little bit longer,” said Silenus softly. “And if you had not used up all the song… Why did you not change her, or fix her? Why could you not have done at least that?”

“Because I wouldn’t change the world just because it’d be nicer that way,” George said. “The world is what the world is. She had
been through enough. She wanted sleep. I let her have it, as you should have long ago.”

“But she was the reason I did what I did. Why I sought out the song. I… I wanted an
explanation
. I wanted to know
why
she was taken from me, how this could be allowed to happen. And there was a slim hope that maybe, just maybe, I could make the Creator bring her back…”

“Aren’t you at least a little mad at her, Harry?” asked Colette. “She betrayed us. She got you killed. Sort of.”

Silenus thought about it. “No,” he said finally, his voice low. “No, I have no anger for her. Perhaps I am not surprised by her betrayal, because I, in my own way, betrayed her long ago. I betrayed her by keeping her alive, and finding a new love… but I admit that after so many years of looking for the song, I forgot why I started looking in the first place. The idea of saving my wife, who I could hardly remember, seemed a small thing in comparison to possessing the very explanation for all of Creation within my hands.” A gleam crept into his eyes again. Yet then it faded. “But now any chance of that is gone. And she is gone. Despite all my efforts, she’s really gone.”

“Have you forgotten the cost of your efforts, though?” asked George. “How many places were lost as a result of your search, Harry? How many lives were eaten by the darkness? Homes and towns just blinking out, as if they never were.”

“I don’t know,” said Silenus. “I know what I did was wrong, but it seemed the only choice. I
had
to. It was all I had left, and I thought if I succeeded then I could repair whatever harm it caused. She got even worse when you joined us, George. You look so much like me when I was young, and…”