e that were far from usual: Devin couldn't remember seeing blue wine offered to performers before. An extravagant gesture, that. He wasn't tempted though; it was too early and he was too much on edge. To calm himself he walked over to Eghano who was lazily drumming, as he always seemed to be, on a tabletop.
Eghano glanced up at him and smiled. "It's just a performance," he said in his soft sibilant voice. "We do what we always do. We make music. We move on."
Devin nodded, and forced a smile in return. His throat was dry though. He went to the side-tables, and one of the two hovering servants hastened to pour him water in a gold and crystal goblet worth more than everything Devin owned in the world. A moment later Menico signaled and they went out into the courtyard.
The dancers began it, backed by hidden strings and pipes. No voices. Not yet.
If Aldine and Nieri had burned love candles late last night it didn't show, or if it did, only in the concentration and intensity of their twinned movements that morning.
Sometimes seeming to pull the music forward, sometimes following it, they looked, with their thin, whitened faces, their blue-grey tunics and the jet-black gloves that hid their palms, truly otherworldly. Which was as Menico had trained his dancers to be. Not inviting or alluring as some other troupes approached this dance of the rites, nor a merely graceful prelude to the real performance, as certain other companies conceived it. Menico's dancers were guides, cold and compelling, towards the place of the dead and of mourning for the dead. Gradually, inexorably, the slow grave movements, the expressionless, almost inhuman faces imposed the silence that was proper on that restive, preening audience.
And in that silence the three singers and four musicians came forward and began the "Invocation" to Eanna of the Lights who had made the world, the sun, the two moons and the scattered stars that were the diamonds of her diadem.
Rapt and attentive to what they were doing, using all the contrivances of professional skill to shape an apparent artlessness, the company of Menico di Ferraut carried the lords and ladies and the merchant princes of Astibar with them on a ruthlessly disciplined cresting of sorrow. In mourning Sandre, Duke of Astibar, they mourned, as was proper, the dying of all the Triad's mortal children, brought through Morian's portals to move on Adaon's earth under Eanna's lights for so short a time. So sweet and bitter and short a season of days.
Devin heard Catriana's voice reaching upwards towards the high place where Alessan's pipes seemed to be calling her, cold and precise and austere. He felt, even more than he heard, Menico and Eghano grounding them all with their deep line. He saw the two dancers, now statues in a frieze, now whirling as captives in the trap of time, and at the moment that was proper he let his own voice soar with the two syrenyae into the space that had been left for them to fill, in the middle range where mortals lived and died.⊕⊕文⊕檔⊕共⊕享⊕與⊕在⊕線⊕閱⊕讀⊕
So Menico di Ferraut had shaped his approach to the seldom-performed Full Mourning Rites long ago, bringing forty years of art and a full, much-traveled life to the moment that this morning had become. Even as he began to sing, Devin's heart swelled with pride and a genuine love for the round, unassuming leader who had guided them here and into what they were shaping.
They stopped, as planned, after the sixth stage, for their own sake and their listeners'. Tomasso had spoken with Menico beforehand, and the nobles' progression past Sandre's bier would now take place upstairs. After, the company would finish with the last three rites, ending on Devin's "Lament," and then the body would be brought down and the crowd outside admitted with their leaves for the crystal vase.
Menico led them out from the courtyard amid a silence so deep it was their highest possible accolade. They reentered the room that had been reserved for their use. Caught up in the moo