Lord Tophet by Gregory Frost

Author:Gregory Frost [Frost, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 0345497597
Google: ktXqiLoAAOkC
Amazon: B0015DRPDG
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2008-07-29T07:00:00+00:00

For the second show Leodora and Glaise propped Diverus into a sitting position, handed him the shawm, and hoped for the best. He moaned and complained in a sloomy way, but was too slurry-witted to do more. With his head down, his eyes closed, he muttered her name, but she had already taken her position beneath the lantern and Soter was already making introductions to the audience, and she didn’t hear him. He barely heard himself. He sagged in defeat, his bones seemingly going soft. He had time for one final coherent thought—This is how Soter goes through life—before the tale was announced: “The Dream of Fortune.” Immediately his comprehension of his surroundings evaporated. Then the spirit invaded him. He acquiesced—not that he could have fought against it, which would have been like fighting against an undertow. He let it have his arms to raise, his lips to shape around the reed. It was as if he were observing himself from outside his own body, as though the source of his skill wanted nothing to do with him in his disgraceful, besotted state.

Then he blinked and the sensation of separateness collapsed. He became bound to the song, living but a fraction of a second ahead of it, his fingers guided to the holes of the shawm as if born to it, flowing eerie trills to shiver the bones. Music filled his mind to the exclusion of everything else. He became forged of music.

When it ended, the tale, he collapsed in a gray slumber, insensate, out of which he arose only when the succeeding tale was announced. His conscious self didn’t even hear his name, but his body took over, reached for the hourglass drum, which he could flex with his knees as he played.

Somewhere in the middle of that tale he began to sober up. An edge of self-awareness flowed through the movements as he drummed, as he picked up a guiro and scraped a stick along it to imitate the clacking of bones. I am Diverus, he repeated in his head. I am Diverus, and Leodora— He couldn’t finish, wasn’t even sure what it was he had intended to say. No, he wasn’t all that sober after all. Besides, he had no idea what she thought of him now, and it didn’t matter, not really. When he’d slept some, he would leave. If he was lucky, he would wake up in the middle of the night and nobody would miss him until he had gone far enough that he could begin as someone else, someone with no past, no name. He yearned to be the idiot that the gods had unmade, the simple creature that only felt things in a dumb way and didn’t have to think them.

When the performance ended he sank down again, aware as at a distance of applause, of cheers and shouts. They were happening somewhere else to someone else. He drifted into unconsciousness beneath the roar of waves pouring over him. Back into the water, came the thought.

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