That evening Izza crept to the Godsdistrikt, where she panhandled for scraps of soul and watched an itinerant players’ opera. The performers were boat people, island-hoppers of the Archipelago, who lashed watertight barrels of props and costumes to the outriggers of their canoes. They sang while they paddled. Their proud voices rang out over the ocean as they approached on the morning tide.
No performance could match that pure dawn cant. Hearing them across the water, if Izza shut her eyes she could imagine they were not players at all but Makawe home from the wars, bearing treasure in crystal boats. Izza wasn’t Kavekanese of course, but she’d always liked the prophecy of the gods’ return and the paradise to follow.
More, anyway, than she liked this opera. Hard to pin down why. At first she thought she didn’t believe the abandoned bride would really wait three years for her husband to return. Later, watching from a fire escape above the crowd, face pressed between iron rails, she decided that, no, people believed crazier things every day. The problem was the last act, when the bride received a letter announcing that her husband was dead or remarried or something—Izza didn’t know enough Descended Telomeri, especially when sung at high volume with poor intonation, to follow the fine points of the plot—and committed suicide. Izza bought the suicide. The bride’s acceptance of the letter was a stretch. A real person would put more work into self-deception.
But the singers sang beautifully despite the occasional dropped consonant. After the bride plunged her knife into her neck and the orchestra crescendoed its last crescendo, Izza only stole a little from the hat they passed around for donations.
The sun had long since sunk. Godsdistrikt lights burned a million shades of red, and mainlanders milled down narrow streets seeking food, drink, and sex from businesses happy to oblige. Izza bargained for her dinner with a kabob stand owner: an hour’s work passing out glyphed placards to pedestrians, each placard stamped with a crude picture of a meat skewer and a subtle charm to guide its bearer to the owner’s stall. She ate the kabobs she earned for her work on a rooftop near a thronged intersection where smuggler priests promised pieces of cut-rate heaven to passersby.
When she finished the kabobs the priests were still chanting discount salvation, with no more takers. Some nights she could watch them for hours, but now she was only killing time. She wiped her hands clean on her pant leg, left the skewers piled on the red tiles, and crossed roofs north to the poet’s house.