At the Edge of Waking Read Free

to the baked earth beyond the wall. Ruy slipped down, one hand on his rapier’s scabbard, to retrieve it. One drop clung to its mouth, bright as liquid glass in the sunlight, and Santiago had a glancing vision, a waking siesta dream of an earthenware pitcher heavy with water, round-bellied, sweating, cool in his hands. The plastic bottle was light as eggshells, an airy nothing after the crucible and glass.
    “Thanks,” he said, and shaking off the lure of sleep, he dropped the bottle in the re-use box and gathered up his clothes.
    The observatory crowned the higher of Orroco’s two peaks, gazing down in academic tolerance at the Assembly buildings on the other height. More convenient for Sandoval than for his friends, but such was the privilege of leadership. Santiago felt no resentment as he made the long, hot walk with Ruy. He was glad of the company, glad of the summons, glad of the excuse to visit the observatory grounds. Too glad, perhaps, but he was old enough to know that he could have refused, hung up his hammock for a well-earned sleep, and it was that feeling of choice, of acting out of desire rather than need, that let him walk as Ruy’s equal. Their voices woke small echoes from the buildings that shaded the streets, the faint sounds falling about them like the dust kicked up by their feet. Even the short bridge between Asuada and Orroco was built up and in the evenings the street was a fiesta, a promenade complete with music, paper flowers, colored lanterns, laughing girls, but now even the shady balconies were abandoned. These days the city’s inhabitants withdrew into their rooms like bats into their caves, hiding from the sun. There was an odd, stubborn, nonsensical freedom to being one of the fools who walked abroad, dizzy and too dry to sweat, as if the heat of afternoon were a minor thing, trivial beside the important business of living.
    “Why does Sandoval attend the debates? I didn’t think . . . ”
    “That he cared?” Ruy gave Santiago a slanting look. “That we cared? About the Assembly, we don’t. Or at least, I don’t. They talk, I’d rather live. No, but Sandoval’s family holds one of the observer’s seats and he goes sometimes to . . . Well. He says it’s to gather ammunition for his lampoons, but sometimes I wonder if it’s the lampoons that are the excuse.”
    “Excuse?”
    “For doing his duty. That’s the sort of family they are. Duty! Duty!” Ruy thumped his hand to his chest and laughed.
    Santiago was—not quite disappointed—he decided he was intrigued. He had not thought that was the kind of man Sandoval was.
    Sandoval himself, as if he knew he had to prove Ruy wrong, had gathered an audience in the shady precincts of the observatory’s eastern colonnade. He mimicked a fat councilor whose speech was all mournful pauses, a fussy woman who interrupted herself at every turn, one of the famous party leaders who declaimed like an actor, one hand clutching his furrowed brow. Santiago, having arrived in the middle of this impromptu play, couldn’t guess how the debate was progressing, but he was struck more forcibly than ever by the great wellspring of spirit inside Sandoval that gave life to one character after another and made people weep with laughter.
    “And where is he in all of this?”
    Santiago turned, almost shocked. He would never have asked that question, yet it followed so naturally on his own thought he felt transparent, as if he had been thinking aloud. But Luz, who had spoken, was watching Sandoval, and by her manner might have been speaking to herself. Santiago hesitated over a greeting. Luz looked up at him, her face tense with a challenge he did not really understand.
    “Isn’t that what actors do?” he said. “Bury themselves in their roles?”
    “Oh, surely,” she said. “Surely. Here we see Sandoval the great actor, and in a minute more we’ll see Sandoval the great actor playing the role of Sandoval the great actor not playing a role.