Finished last year. Back to writing ‘proper’ novels and I hope not to stray
again. Any number of modern novelists
seem to have influenced this – Margaret Atwood, Kate Atkinson, Zadie Smith and
(of course) Paul Scott. Not sure they
always show but my intention was pure.
Probably a better work than ‘The Innocents’ but it gets bloody grim
towards the end. So the except below
comes from the second chapter, when there still seemed to be hope for everyone. It’s set in a theatre, in case
that isn’t immediately obvious. The
full book can be bought from lulu.com"So you were coaxing her for how long?" Aka called out.
"Oh, three, three and a half hours," Molben bellowed from the bathroom.
"Hm." Aka was sitting up in bed. She began rubbing a cream made of witch hazel, rosemary and dried rose petals into her hands and face. The substance was supposed to moisturise the skin and leave it, according to the patter of the salesman, "fresh and supple." Aka was not entirely convinced. Her skin was feeling more dry and desiccated than ever. Not only were the lines deepening and breeding, the spaces in between them were becoming arid. A ploughed, barren field. Harbinger, she supposed, of the approaching day when the skin would flake off her bones entirely. She continued to smear the cream, however. As with many practices, she suspected that while she was not improving matters, they would get much worst if she stopped.
"What did you say?"
"I said 'hm.'" She had already been preparing for bed when Molben arrived home. She was an early sleeper and an early riser; proof, she always claimed, that she was an administrator rather than an actress. Molben was the opposite by nature but forced himself to copy her rhythms. At first he had lain awake for hours and was bleary and irritable when she woke him with the rising sun. Now he sometimes dropped off before she did and rose in almost indecently good spirits. (Never one to let such opportunities pass, he often berated his actors for their slovenly nocturnal habits.) Aka listened to him clattering gracelessly around the bathroom. No doubt he was trying to simultaneously wash his face, brush his teeth and smear his hair with an odiferous paste intended to curb his moulting. He was playing catch-up, trying to be ready to extinguish the candles at the same moment she was. They went to bed together, rose together, broke fast together and dined together. They were determined to preserve, at the very least, the external forms of two souls united.
"What does 'hm' mean?" he asked indistinctly. His mouth was full of another compound; this time the fishbone, honey and clove oil melange used in 1335 to clean teeth. Ammonia had been popular until recently due to its efficaciousness at whitening the enamel. However, people found they could no longer reconcile themselves to quaffing what was basically urine.
"It doesn't mean anything. I'm surprised the cleaners didn't turn you out."
"They did after a while. Damn bucket and shovel merchants. We popped back to my office for a bit."
"At the theatre?"
"Of course."
Hm, Aka thought. She began brushing her black and silver hair. Freed of its bun, the style most recently adapted, it flowed down her body almost to her buried hips. A few lice were unseated by the remorseless sweep of the brush and squirmed helplessly on the sheets. Aka crushed them irritably. Cockroaches in the house and lice in the head; the two vermin impossible to vanquish permanently. "Molben, why didn't you just come back here?"
He thrust his head around the door. "Because, sweet angel, I knew you'd disapprove. And you have a tendency to hang around scenes you disapprove of and, shall we say, get chippy."
The head disappeared. "And how did you know I wouldn't approve?" she called after it. "Because I said so last week. And you agreed, Molben. No special treatment for the new girl."
"Oh dash it, don't turn the thing into an issue. It's not as if she can't actually act. I was just… initiation, y'know? We have many strange ways and sometimes a little help's needed to adjust."
"Is that fair on all the novices not personally coached by you?"
Molben reappeared, permanently this time. Despite Aka's many protests, he was again wearing his absurd scarlet night robe. "Life is unfair, my sweet. And theatre is a mirror of life."
"That's the most ridiculous excuse I've ever heard."
"Oh, I have worst, I have worst." Smiling, he manoeuvred himself under the sheets. Aka put her hairbrush down and lay beside him.
"I'm still not convinced you haven't been on a binge at the Statues. Let me smell your breath. Ha!" she said triumphantly when he exhaled into her face. "I thought so. Port!"
"Damn it all, woman," he murmured happily. "I had a glass after coming home. You heard me shouting 'where's the port bottles kept, the decanter's empty?'"
"Just establishing an alibi, I bet." They lay in silence for a while. They were not holding each other – their bodies were not quite touching – but there was a stronger air of intimacy than normal. Usually they would face away, Aka perhaps flicking through her book of psalms and Molben perusing some correspondence. On an impulse, she reached under his robe. His faint smile broadened as she gently took hold of his member. It was limp at first but she started to massage it, kneading the loose skin between her thumb and forefinger. Her touch was soft and sure. And after a few minutes of her expert attention his penis remained limp; and she noticed that his smile had grown rather wan.
"Not in the mood?" she asked, as neutrally as she could. She withdrew her hand.
"Sorry. You know me and port."
"I know you and deadlines. Is this it until your wretched play opens?"
She also knew about him and other women. Not often, not for very long, but it had happened. And he was not a natural adulterer. When he delved in foreign beds, he had nothing left to give his wife. She thought of him alone with Priss in his office and a spasm of hatred rippled through her. But she fought it back. The scenario did not feel plausible. Yes, his most common targets in the past had been young, needy actresses. When Molben strayed, however, he lied. He lied so frequently and so implausibly that his fictions quickly became tangles of absurdity. It was one of the signs she looked for – he stopped making sense. If he had been unfaithful with Priss, he would not have supplied a tale featuring the girl at all. Of course, that could simply mean he was using her as a shield for a liaison with someone entirely different. Aka considered this for a moment. She realised she would almost prefer it to the account he had given.
"Let's have a proper go tomorrow, mm?" he said. "We'll take a decent run-up." He was speaking softly in his most cogent voice. It was not just seductive but was also embarrassed, amiable, warm. It was likeable. Aka could still forgive her husband for almost anything when he was trying to be likeable. She turned to meet his face and their lips connected for a long moment.
Her parents had not wanted them to marry. They had only grudgingly accepted Aka going on the stage in the first place. It was not exactly something a young lady ought to be doing. Her parents were wealthy Craiglothan aristocrats by birth. While their adopted country treated them as just another wagon-load of Craiglothan immigrants, albeit with rather more money than most, they still believed they had standards to maintain. An adolescent whim could be indulged. Acting made their daughter happy and they did feel that was an important goal – to an extent. Getting married to the stage, though, was different to treading it. Aka had hitherto been messing around, filling in time before marrying and raising a family. They considered themselves fortunate she had found a more innocent occupation during the dangerous period of late teens and early twenties than many girls. But marriage was for life. By wedding Molben, already intrinsically linked to the Fobes National Theatre, Aka would be making an irrevocable commitment to a fundamentally frivolous pastime. She was one treacherous step away from disgracing herself. Or so Mr and Mrs Darline thought, and they were not necessarily alone.
Nor were they entirely sure about Molben himself. They were not snobs. Or rather, they were but they tried very hard not to be. When they moved to Hyath they were warned they should embrace its ideals concerning the dignity and equality of all men. Very few Hyans actually do embrace them, certainly not in the elite circles which the Darlines' fortunes allowed them to enter. But immigrants are expected to offer qualities in exchange for Hyan citizenship. Sometimes these are skills, sometimes the willingness to impersonate slave labour. And always required is the ability to meet the standards which native Hyans cannot. So the Darlines tried; but underneath they remained Craiglothan aristocrats. They were uneasy. Actors, whatever their popular acclaim, are not in the 'best' classes even in Hyath. They are not gentry, they are not professionals. It is hard to classify them precisely but possibly they belong with skilled craftsmen like blacksmiths and masons. And Molben himself? He was an actor from scalp to soles. His modest, if growing, wealth and status was derived entirely from the stage. Though the Darlines tried not to heed them, there were rumours that he had actually been raised in an orphanage. Certainly he had no family they knew of. All the Darlines could really do was contemplate how much worst it might have been. He could have been a soldier, he could have been a stableboy. Their sentiments were never spoken in public, possibly not even to one another, but infused their restrained and insincere body language.
Nor did Molben exactly help matters. Aka knew he was not really to blame. A strange courtship was conducted between her fiancee and her parents, both sides trying rather desperately to like the other and never entirely succeeding If they had met ten years later then the joint seduction would have been a lot easier, and not only because of his sudden rise in prestige. Molben had indeed been born in an orphanage but he was making a resolute effort to leave it behind. He had already travelled an impressive distance by 1313, the year he got engaged to Aka. Not far enough, however. For example, he proposed to Aka before even meeting her parents. He should have approached from the other direction, seeking their consent first and then that of the startled girl herself. Perhaps he forgot the correct procedure in his excitement, perhaps he was ignorant of it. (Aka was so touched that she immediately consented without correcting him. She knew was partially culpable for the poor impression he made.) There was his family, or the lack thereof. There was also his fortune, likewise, some of his manners, quite a few of his friends and his accent. By his twenty third birthday, Molben had eradicated most of his sharp, nasal Hyan tones in favour of the lifeless and generic cadences of the aristocracy. Again, over time the transformation would be absolute but in 1313 it was still a work in progress. He was excellent at feigning accents on stage and that was part of the problem. He talked as if he were in a play and Aka knew that, whatever he might claim, they never portray life accurately. His delivery was too forced, too stilted, too hollow. Occasionally it sounded as if he were parodying the class he was trying to join.
And then there were his clothes. Most especially, there were his clothes.
The day after he became engaged to Aka, with her stunned parents still attempting to comprehend the news, he appeared at their door for a hastily arranged dinner party. He wore the following: a white shirt with red pinstripes, golden tassels on the breast and winged cuffs stretching to his elbows; a pair of white and almost skin-tight pantaloons; a bright yellow ruff; a pair of tall riding boots; a pair of white lace gloves; and a three-cornered hat with a jaunty pheasant feather. Afterwards he swore he had bought the outfit from a genuine tailor and had not raided the National's costume department, but he might as well have. He looked beyond ridiculous; he looked like a walking punchline. Aka guessed that, at one level, he was supposed to. He always had an acute sense of self-parody. It could sometimes be expressed so subtly that even he did not spot it and certainly had little control over it. Aka's parents, however, did not perceive all the nuances when he first walked into the drawing room. For a very long moment they froze, not beginning to guess what they were supposed to do. Mr Darline had a habit of uttering a long, drawn-out "Very well" when confronted by the inexplicable. "Ve-e-e-e-r-r-y w-e-e-e-l-l-l." His face became a nonplussed blank to match. Aka noticed the expression forming when he shook hands with Molben and only his good manners left the drawl unspoken.
The rest of the evening was scarcely any better. The Darlines, being polite, asked Molben many questions about his profession. Molben, being fanatical, answered each one in excruciating detail. The whole dinner consisted of him making speeches about the Fobes National and Hyan stagecraft in general to a disinterested, barely comprehending audience. "Ejaculates through his mouth," was the verdict of Aka's younger brother afterwards. In darker moments much later, she thought this an oddly prophetic statement. Her brother considered himself to be a native Hyan (he was one year old when he left Craiglothe, Aka three) and so under no obligation to be fair to his alleged inferiors. He mocked mercilessly, largely although not entirely behind the actor's back. Every facet of Molben was ridiculed; his origins, his mannerisms, his pretensions, his verbosity and, most consistently, his clothes.
In a way, Aka joined in. She always accepted that her betrothed was peculiar, he was monomaniacal, most of all that he was different. Many of his features could be made into a joke. The only different was that she jested affectionately whereas her brother sneered. She never attempted to stress Molben's similarities to the top strata and demonstrate how easily he could be inserted. It would have made their engagement, and their wedding two years later, a lot less painful if she had. It would have also been what his own ambitions desired. But she wished him to be different. She had fallen in love with a contradictory oddity who did not exactly belong anywhere. And she cherished the way traces of his background still surfaced at first. Occasionally he emitted an expression straight from the poorhouse, not necessarily coarse but laden with local slang. He had a commitment to unstinting hard work, whipping himself on in the absence of a master to do it for him. And she often noticed him observing some foible of the upper classes, frowning as he tried to comprehend it. He always did eventually, however, and gradually all the mysteries vanished. And the more he perfected his impression of a bucolic nobleman, the less interesting he became.
They met through the National, naturally. Aka had joined the house company when she was eighteen. Molben himself oversaw her audition. He had already been with the theatre for eight years and was the closest the moribund institution had to a star. Every lead billing went his way, every poster featured his name prominently. He was not the greatest actor in Fobes at the time, let alone in Hyath, but he was the most exciting the National could offer. In addition he served as the theatre's archivist, its script doctor, the guardian of its spirit and, most importantly, assistant and pupil of its manager Sev Caban. Caban had already begun his irresistible decline, gnawed from inside by illness and battered from outside by machinations equally lethal. Under his ghostly reign it was effectively Molben who ran the theatre; at least, the small part not rigidly controlled by its owners. Molben did not rate Aka especially highly. But she could act, she could sing, she was pretty enough and, because she did not need the money, he did not have to pay her much. Coquettish best friend to the heroine, he decided, or the duke's daughter who gets brutally raped and slain half-way through.
They spent the next three years disliking one another. It was a strange soil for love to flourish in. Not real hatred, not suppressed desire, just indifference sprinkled with vague contempt. Molben believed Aka to be another dilettante taking to the theatre for a few years to get some anecdotes, never granting it the reverence it deserved. Aka had received a broad enough education to know the meaning of the phrase 'anally retentive.' The overall atmosphere was no more joyous. The National was grinding to a gradual halt. It was producing nothing of worth and was even being eclipsed as the first choice for the establishment by the Parthan Theatre. Molben said later that if you are overshadowed by the Parthan, which was founded as a daring and experimental alternative to the National and spent most of its history steadfastly ignoring its remit, you are in trouble. Virtually everyone at the National was moving in a trance. Anybody with any ambition quickly left.
Molben was the one exception, unwilling or unable to separate the National from Hyan drama in general. He lacked the authority to make a real difference, though, and he was frustrated. Meanwhile, Aka was just bored. After the terror and exhilaration of her first appearances on stage, after the adrenaline had dribbled away, she found herself trapped in an irrelevance. If she had wanted that, she could have remained in Fobes' Craiglothan community. The only amusement came from cataloguing the ways in which the National ought to be improved; not just its artistic output but its administration, financing, ticketing, marketing, everything. She considered switching to another theatre but that would have convinced her parents that she was serious about acting. It was something she was far from certain about herself. By 1313 she was wondering whether receiving constant berations, being herded around the stage like cattle, mechanically repeating the same moronic lines, donning a tight, filthy dress, wearing a bug-infested wig and fielding perpetual questions from anxious parents was really worth the prickle of excitement before curtain rise and the stab of pleasure as the applause flowed in. There had to be better ways for a wealthy dilettante to harvest anecdotes.
Then she found herself sitting next to Molben at the back of the hall watching a rehearsal of The Rose Bushes. There are two main strands in Hyan theatre. One utilises drama to carry political or social messages. The other is all about the spectacle. The Rose Bushes was definitely drawn from the latter. Belonging to an eleventh century movement called the glories, it employs glittering costumes, bountiful casts, dazzling dance sequences and an awful lot of saccharine songs. It retells an old Sakist legend but the plot is not of particular importance; all that matters is drugging the audience. Molben and Aka watched the rehearsal with glum expressions. Without wholly knowing why, they began grumbling to one another. Molben conceded that The Rose Bushes was part of the nation's heritage but felt it should be buried in history. The structure was infantile, the characters vacuous and the message nothing a five year old child could not write unaided. Aka was brooding over the cost of the specially designed costumes and the dozens of extras employed solely to leap into the air and kick their legs at certain times. She also wondered if the National should maybe notice that musicals were becoming increasingly unpopular and conclude that people were wanting more from a play than a hummable tune. After voicing their laments, they looked at one another. They were suddenly delighted they had reached the same point from two very different directions. Much later on, Aka asked herself if it was entirely healthy that their relationship was founded on a mutual antipathy. Was love not supposed to begin with shared pleasures?
It was a strange romance at first. Molben tried courting her in the traditional aristocratic style, namely by taking her to wonderful, idyllic places. He could not afford to whisk her off to the usual pleasure spots, the Grotto of Sen Arman on the Unas Heights or the Jistic Waterfall in the western Grevas Uplands. So he had to devise his own itinerary with the meagre savings and scraps of culture he had acquired. He took her on a day's ride to see a huge and suspiciously phallic sandstone monolith which, he assured her, was the only one of its type in the world. He blagged his way up the central basilica of the Dadomes Palace, the highest point in the city, to show her all of Fobes spread out beneath them, all of dirty, smoky, sprawling, poorly planned Fobes. (A trip also demonstrating he did have some influence, even if it were only amongst bored palace guards). Once they rode to the town of Primas solely to visit a woman reputed to be the most powerful fortune teller in northern Teraf, who in essence predicted that one day Aka would be rich and influential and betrayed. Laughter ran underneath each trip. Molben kept a straight face but that sense of self-parody guided him throughout. Aka already knew men who laughed at themselves. Half of her father's pronouncements were saturated with dark mockery. Never before, though, had she met anybody who devoted such effort to illustrating the original source of comedy – the gap between aspiration and position.
Of course, most commonly Molben took her to the theatre. Such trips were less enjoyable on the surface but also more satisfying. Life stopped being a black joke. Molben's reserve dissipated and he became passionate, irrational and very attractive. Sometimes they rode miles into the country to a coaching inn simply to coincide with a particularly renowned touring company. Mostly, though, they remained in Fobes. They visited the Foyles Playhouse opposite Karn Los, a semi-derelict pit not far from closure. They called at the Galt Theatre on Tradis Plaza, a beachhead recently established by an ambitious company from the town of Galt in southern Hyath. They frequented the Mepple on Caciss Road, commonly and erroneously called the first theatre in Hyath. They observed the grandiloquent monologues of the performers in Keln Square. They patronised a dozen poky, fetid holes scattered around the city which were little more than drinking houses. They scuttled into 'theatres' which really were the back rooms of taverns and which on other nights acted as gambling dens. They even bluffed their way into command performances given in the private residences of noblemen. Molben's demeanour was always that of an addict. He never truly enjoyed the shows. If they were bad he would groan in pain; if good he would also groan, wondering why the National could never match their standards. Nothing caught him by surprise, however. Usually he told Aka beforehand exactly which genre the play belonged to. On his rare occasions of ignorance, he had it categorised within ten minutes. They saw happy plays, sad plays, ambivalent plays, plays which butchered their entire cast, plays which terminated in quadruple marriages, plays which had no discernible storyline, plays which did have a plot but chose to tell it back to front, plays which were little more than extended song and dance sequences and plays which merely consisted of two men exchanging terse remarks. Molben knew where to place them all: indigenous, satire, mendish, glories, neo-glories, abstract, cammat, chatterer or any other definition used to chop drama up into comprehensible slices.
Aka was amazed. Not with his knowledge – it merely confirmed her early assessment – but that he had so much to retain anally. Previously she had thought drama to be a relatively straightforward science. But in Hyath at least, the simple act of people talking on a stage has been stretched as far as it possibly can. Most of all she was astonished by the diversity which existed in Fobes. Her definition of the theatre had been confined to Castle Hill and maybe the occasional market square performance. Molben showed her how the art had flooded the city, seeping through the cobbles and erupting in great geysers when given the merest opening. Fobes, he said in one of his less self-conscious moods, was built not on nationalism or on textiles; it was built on drama.
If that were true, it was only perceivable by the right type of eyes. Aka's family had never possessed them. The Darlines arrived in Fobes in 1295. They were not exactly the traditional penniless migrants – six servants, four wagons and a great many possessions came with them. There was no frantic search to find lodgings on the first night because Mr Darline's agents had discretely secured a house before they even departed. Nonetheless, a great deal was left behind at their Craiglothan estates; and they also brought with them an aura of desperation. And on the surface it was very curious that they chose Fobes as their destination. Seventeen years earlier some other Craiglothans had made an impromptu visit to the capital. They carried swords and torches and they overran it. The Dadomes Palace was, for once, not surrendered by the Hyan government. It had to endure a long, grim siege, however, during which it impotently observed the city in enemy hands. Reinforcements only came to chase the Craiglothan armies out of Fobes two months later. The rest of western Hyath was liberated not long afterwards, the invasion melting as quickly as it had solidified. But in 1295 the scars were still visible on Hyan buildings, families and individuals. Fobes should have rescinded its traditional role of semi-willing host to gangs of Craiglothan refugees. If anything, it was more likely to become the setting for pogroms of the existing settlers. The Darlines, it is true, were driven out of their home by roughly the same regime who launched the invasion. This would be a cumbersome defence to give to every racist, however, and far too subtle for a devoted lynch mob.
Yet the strangest part of the Craiglothan invasion, along with the fact that it ever happened, was that it did not traumatise Hyath greatly. Less than the Marlan conquest a century earlier still did, and far less than the Civil Wars back in the 1070's. It helped that the Craiglothan troops behaved relatively well during their conquest. They burnt some of the subjugated city but did not match the savagery of the Marlans towards the Hyans or the Civil Wars dictators towards their own people. The Craiglothans still harboured unfashionable notions about only killing other armed men. And the aftermath of the invasion sated any Hyan bloodlust. Once they had evicted the Craiglothans, Hyath launched 'The Scourings,' a series of devastating punitive raids which burnt and slaughtered settlements across the border. Really, though, Hyath was remarkably quick to recover and even to forgive because, well, it was Craiglothe. The war had been a nonsense to start with. Nothing more than an escalation of some skirmishes in the Manatan Lands, a shared region in the south-west. The Manatans hold the sort of contentious border which Hyath seems to possess on all sides; but unlike the eastern frontier with Marlan, the dispute had never fostered full conflict before. Craiglothe was Hyath's ally. It had made an opportunistic and brief intervention into the Civil Wars, there had been a series of squabbles and scuffles, but the two countries always found themselves on the same side when it really mattered. Besides – Craiglothe? It was Hyath's younger, weaker brother. Always trying to mimic its more sophisticated sibling, always trying to catch up, always looking ridiculous in the process. Hyans had treated Craiglothe as a buffoon for so long, they could not readjust to treating it as a danger. Therefore its subjects continued to be derided rather than scapegoated. Some writers claimed the invasion was really Craiglothe's attempt to force its neighbour to take it seriously for once. If so, it was a dismal failure.
So perhaps Aka could understand why her parents chose the broad road to Fobes. She never really learned why they left, however. Her father had owned a sizeable swathe of land and occupied a middling rung on the ladder to power. Then he suddenly decamped to another country, an unknown refugee if not a bedraggled one. Throughout her childhood she overheard saturnine hints concerning plots and vendettas. When she turned sixteen she was given the full tangled tale and emerged no wiser. All it told her was that court politics bore a strong resemblance to the patterns of friendships and rivalries exercised by her fellow schoolgirls. She did wonder if the story was a façade and the Darlines had come to Hyath for the most ancient reason. Namely to make, or rather to increase, their fortune. Hopefully not, for they did not really succeed. Her father never managed to acquire more land and instead put his money into assorted business ventures. Some investments were remarkably astute, some laughably fatuous; and at the end of it all he was essentially where he had started. A series of peaks and troughs, maybe, but the vaults were always full enough to give the illusion of a flat line. This continuity was one of the features of Aka's youth. Her family never exuberated in the good times, never resorted to second-hand clothes in the bad. They never even left their first modest three-story house. It was as if their first great exodus was the only upheaval and the only risk the Darlines would ever be able to endure. They would spend the rest of their lives placidly hiding in another country's culture.
Their children had different perspectives, of course. Unlike her brother, Aka never claimed to be entirely of Hyath. If asked – at least now, from the security of her position – she would mention her birthplace. But she could not elaborate on that simple fact. She only had one memory of the land which created her. That was from the day she left and it did not contain any actual features of Craiglothe. She was inside a carriage in the courtyard of their mansion, waiting for departure. Her parents were still in the house. Aka did not know why; probably, she reasoned later, overseeing the final stages of the packing. Her baby brother was beside her, sensibly strapped into his seat. Aka had been left free, however, and was temporarily unattended. Presumably she was messing with the coach door. It abruptly sprung open, catapulting her out towards the ground. The cobbles must have been quite sharp. They ripped across the back of her left hand and tore down her forearm. Aka did not realise this immediately. She was only aware, as she lay stunned, of her dress sleeve being serrated and blood spreading across the stones. Her brother started to scream. He would not have seen her injury but doubtless he was panicked by her sudden disappearance. His wails sent his parents scurrying out of the front door. They picked Aka up, her father tried to bind her wound and her mother shrieked for the servants. But they were also furious with her. As they tended to her they shouted reprimands spiked with rage. Strangely enough, Aka could not recall feeling any pain. It was probably there. But all she remembered was her parents' enraged faces and the blood surging from her to the ground. Actually, that was her one memory of Craiglothe itself – those cobbles painted a sticky red.
Much later, she asked her mother about their anger. Well, we were frightened, came the reply. There was so much blood at first. And we were worried about you travelling with a wound, concerned that it might become septic on the road. And – well, there is a superstition in Craiglothe. If a mishap occurs at the outset of a journey, it is a bad omen. Just a silly notion but we were very tense and… Aka considered this and decided she would have been angry too. Not just a journey but perhaps a whole new life cursed thanks to a stupid girl leaning on a door and playing with the handle.
The rest of her knowledge about Craiglothe came from her parents. They told her relatively little about their own lives but imparted a great deal about the country in general; its history, geography, customs, legends, heroes and villains. Constantly emphasised was that she was a part of the country and always would be. At the same time they stressed the importance of attaching herself to her new home. They seemingly wanted her to suffer the same cultural schizophrenia which they did. The principle was even applied to her name. She had been called Bettchy before she left Craiglothe. When she arrived in Hyath, suddenly she was Aka. It was a traditional Hyan name but it was also tellingly close to 'Acca', the capital of Craiglothe. The Darlines must have been ecstatic when they made that discovery; a way of permanently lashing their little girl to the border, head in one country and feet in the other. They were not being not cruel or even selfish. They strongly believed in the necessity of both assimilating with the current and appreciating the past. It was just that their approach led to a state of permanent confusion and marginalisation; and eventually Aka would have rejected it.
However, she never had to make that decision. She enjoyed the fairy tales, a bloodthirsty banquet of ogres and wizards and wicked fathers and talking horses. She liked looking at her mother's Craiglothan artefacts, the intricate bracelets made of overlapping silver circles and the beautiful amber necklaces. But she only ever belonged to one country. Everyone apart from her parents realised this. Sometimes she was teased at school because of her birthplace. But everyone was ridiculed for something. The school was very good, probably better than her parents could really afford. Very few girls were real gentry, the aristocracy preferring to seal their daughters away on their country estates with private tutors. It did, however, educate the progeny of the best class of merchants and lawyers. None of this made the pupils any kinder; they simply expressed their cruelty through verbal rather than physical means. Some girls were teased because they were Craiglothan, others because they were Astic or Christotan or non-Sakist or fat or thin or freckled. Nearly everyone had a 'fault' and only if they were seen as vulnerable – which Aka never was, even as a girl – was it continually stressed.
She knew her parents were disappointed that both their children ignored their origins. Very occasionally Aka sympathised with them. She would wish she had not become so culturally monochrome, even if her choice had been largely unconscious. And her parents' longing may also have been why they did not want her approaching the stage. It was the ultimate expression of Hyan-hood, an affirmation that she and her adopted country were one. Yet Aka had already made that declaration. It was as if the exodus had severed her in two, each half belonging to their respective countries. And a little girl called Bettchy had been left behind in Craiglothe. She had never been lifted back into the carriage; and in whimsical moments Aka wondered what had become of her. Most likely the fall would have killed her. She had been cremated on a Craiglothan pyre. Perhaps, though, she had simply been abandoned by her panicking parents, the cause of the ill omen expunged. She grew up where she was supposed to; identical at heart to her unseen sister but utterly unlike in every manner. Aka was often tempted to see where she might be living. In fact, she could probably visit the exact site. Her mother would reveal the location, albeit rather reluctantly. And Aka had no doubt she could bully her way into what had once been the Darline mansion. If nothing else, she would take away some memories of her lost home other than those gory cobbles. It was a pilgrimage she promised to make every other spring, once the weather improved and the roads were better. By the end of the summer, though, she always found she had just stayed in Hyath.
Eventually her parents came to accept Molben, to a degree. It was made clear to them that the only alternative to a blessing was their daughter eloping with an actor. This would more or less be disaster incarnate. Holding a proper wedding, with the spina alba torch and the bronze bracelets and the crowns of leaves and nuts, at least enabled them to show a defiant face to the sniggers. And Molben was perceived as a coming man, even if the Darlines did not like where he was coming from or going to. He also exuded his considerable charm on them once his self-consciousness receded and he learned how to behave himself. However, Aka also liked to believe that tolerance sidled in because her parents had recognised a fellow traveller. Molben was on a journey too, one more arduous and protracted than theirs had ever been. When they first met, he was also stranded uneasily between two domains. It was in their nature to sympathise. Even though his opinions on the preservation of roots was very different to their own. Unlike the nostalgic Craiglothans, Molben was determined not to take a single memento, a single scrap of his old life with him.
