Burning Bright

Merchant Investors’ Syndicate, Lioe translated, and leaned forward a little. On the distant deck, a dark figure lifted its head, rose forward as though to its knees, and hung there for a moment, an indistinct shadow against the thin bank of light that was the far bank of the Water. Lioe caught her breath, heard a shocked murmur from the people filling the seiner to her right, and the same questioning noises from the crowd on the bank behind her. Gelsomina smiled faintly, said nothing. Then the figure straightened fully, and the lights came on, revealing a shape in a nipwaisted coat and the blood-red shoulder-cape-and-hood of Captain Rider. She was a familiar template in the Game, one of the heroic almost-pirates who defended the Scattered Worlds against the Imperium, and Lioe waited eagerly for her to lower her hood. The puppet lifted both hands—light glinted from the ring, Captain Rider’s seal, worn on its right forefinger, and Lioe smiled at the careful detail—and slipped the hood back. There was something not quite right about the face, though, something unfamiliar, added or taken away from the template. Lioe frowned, puzzled, and realized that the puppet’s eyes didn’t match, one blue, one brown. Behind her, the crowd cheered.

“Holy shit,” Roscha said, “that’s Berengaria.”

“More politics,” Gelsomina said, but did not sound particularly displeased this time.

“The governor?” Lioe said.

Roscha nodded, grinning, and raised her voice to carry over the cheers and shrill whistles from the crowd. “She’s one of theirs, the MIS’s, I mean. And they’re proud of her.”

“She’s favored them enough, you mean,” Gelsomina said.

For all she hates politics, Lioe thought, she knows a lot about what’s going on. Still, it was a clever move, associating Governor Berengaria—who from all accounts supported Burning Bright’s freedom from both the metagovernments, and leaned to the Republic, her friends said, only because they were less of a threat than the HsaioiAn—with Captain Rider, protector of the Scattered Worlds. Not subtle, admittedly, but clever.

“And Rider’s not what you’d call a Beauty,” Gelsomina went on, her voice rising, querulous.

“She’s surely not a Beast,” Roscha answered, and Lioe intervened again.

“What is the rule?”

“There isn’t really a rule,” Gelsomina said, grudgingly. “Not written down, anyway. But the tradition is to alternate the pageant barges, a Beauty and a Beast, and the figures are usually taken from mythology. Not from the Game.”

“The Game’s a kind of mythology,” Lioe said mildly, overriding something Roscha started to say, and after a moment the john-boat pilot subsided.

“Oh, I know,” Gelsomina answered. “It’s just—oh, very God, I hate getting old. You always end up sounding like your own mother.”

Lioe grinned and saw Roscha relax even further. “Who designs the puppets?” she asked at random, hoping to turn the conversation even further, and saw a fourth barge pull into view.

“Who’s that?” Roscha demanded.

Gelsomina worked her glasses, shook her head. “Can’t tell yet.”

On the distant deck, a figure unfolded, barely rising out of a crouch before the spotlights struck it. A dancing satyr leered back at the crowd, goat-legged, rude horns jutting from its forehead and implied beneath its gilded fig leaf; it was crowned with oak and ivy, golden acorns— they must be the size of melons, Lioe realized, too big to span in my cupped hands—and carried a double flute. The cheers were less than enthusiastic, to her surprise, and she looked at Roscha.

“It’s been done before,” Roscha said, and Gelsomina shook her head.

“It’s Soresin, too. I expected better, after what I heard they spent this year.”

Then, quite suddenly, the satyr began to move. As though it had heard the comments, it thumbed its nose to each bank in turn, still grinning, then lifted its flute to its thick lips. It began to play, and, seconds later, the sound reached the watching crowd, a thin, seductive melody that carried the urge to dance and weep in the same quick, minor-keyed strain. A moment later, the puppet began to dance to its own piping, the movements timed so perfectly that for a long moment Lioe forgot the barge, forgot that it was a puppet, and saw only the ghost of an abandoned god dancing against the horizon.

“Now that’s more like it,” Gelsomina said, and her words were nearly drowned by the cheering from the shore. On the seiner next to them, some of the people were dancing, sketching the same quick steps to the satyr’s music. Lioe glanced toward them, saw a young man clasp a woman’s hands and swing her in a sweeping circle. She leaned back, eyes closed, bright skirt flying, her long hair tumbling loose from a Carnival crown of braids, brushing the decks. She came upright laughing, and Lioe looked away from the wild abandon in her face.