Tanith Lee a to Z by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Manuscript Template, Public
Publisher: Telos Publishing Ltd

II

When Vashari arrived, some hours late, his skin seemed made of the dark gold of the candlelight. Here and there across the night terraces, other tables, lit like stages, stood as he came by to call Vashari’s name and applaud him. He bowed to them as he passed, then ran up the steps, laughing.

‘Forgive me. To be late – what can I say?’ His hair, thick and shining, falling across his left brow, was like black water.

The couple of directors at the table laughed with him. ‘As usual late, and what can he say?’

‘Sit,’ said a golden actress. ‘Sit by me?’

But Vashari contrived to sit by all of them, and at last he sat by Indu.

‘Welcome to the Sona.’

She thanked him, and turned her head from his handsomeness, for which she was not prepared. She had grown used to it on celluloid.

‘Why do you turn away? Look at me, beautiful Indu. I saw your last three pictures.’

She had been thinking, People are watching. Out beyond the light, the slender pines which moved in the breeze – eyes. Like the eyes of jackals round a hunter’s fire. But for a moment he astonished her, and she forgot.

‘My pictures? Do you mean –?’

‘I’m your fan,’ said Vashari, the High Prince of the Taja.

‘My pictures,’ she repeated.

‘Yours. And in – what is it? – one more day – you and I make a picture together. Your last role wasn’t right for you.’ (Did the monitor edit?) ‘This will be better. I can help you. My one criticism, you seem too aware of the camera. By all means allure and flirt with it, but not quite so deliberately.’

She thought that, of course he knew how it must be done, and did it with ease, this moment. Aware, unaware … the only balance. But his eyes held hers. The Invisible that watched had faded.

‘You will get used to it,’ he said as if he had read her thoughts, now, earlier. Indu blushed, for the blush had been mounting, through the soles of her slippers, her spine, her throat, all this while, since he ran up on the terrace.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah, Indu. And I thought you didn’t like me.’

‘All women like you.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘but enough. And it’s good to be liked, little Indu. Love is food to the Sona.’

He was modest, too; he had not said ‘food to the gods.’

He spoke for a minute with the others, trivial conversation, but not leaving her. Nearby a man of the musicians’ castes played the sitar-maya. Vashari turned Indu’s head lightly with his hand, to look. ‘In order to play, the fingers must bleed and form calluses, and the calluses themselves be torn on the wire, and torn again, until in the end the fingertips are hard enough to master the strings. Then, there is music.’ He looked at her a long while. With his eyes on her, no other eyes mattered. She said, quietly, ‘But were you a snake-charmer’s son?’

‘Yes. And once I was bitten by a cobra.

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