The Call of Earth: 2 (Homecoming) Read Online Free PDF Page A

miserable imitative theatreinto the dust, and, when it failed,
all
Sevet’s inheritance would be lost, while Kokor would be the leading figure in Basilican theatre, and the day would come when Sevet would come to Kokor and beg her to put her in the starring role in one of her plays, and Kokor would embrace her sister and weep and say, “Oh, my darling sister, I’d love nothing better than to put on your little play, but I have a responsibility to my backers, my sweet, and I can’t very well risk their money on a show starring a singer who is clearly
past her prime.”
    Oh, it was a delicious dream! Never mind that Sevet was only a single year older—to Kokor that made all the difference. Sevet might be ahead
now,
but someday soon youth would be more valuable than age to them, and then it would be Kokor who had the advantage. Youth and beauty—Kokor would always have more of both than Sevet. And she was every bit as talented as Sevet, too.
    Now she was home, the little place that she and Obring rented in Hill Town. It was modest, but decorated in exquisite taste. That much, at least, she had learned from her Aunt Dhelembuvex—Obring’s mother—that it’s better to have a small setting perfectly finished than a large setting badly done. “A woman must present herself as the blossom of perfection,” Auntie Dhel always said. Kokor herself had written it much better, in an aphorism she had published back when she was only fifteen, before she married Obring and left Mother’s house:
    A perfect bud
of subtle color
and delicate scent
is more welcome than a showy
bloom,
which shouts for attention but has
nothing to show
that can’t be seen in the first glance,
or smelled in the first whiff.
    Kokor had been proudest of the way the lines about the perfect bud were short and simple phrases, while the lines about the showy bloom were long and awkward. But to her disappointment no noted melodist had made an aria of her aphorism, and the young ones who came to her with their tunes were all talentless pretenders who had no idea how to make a song that would suit a voice like Kokor’s. She didn’t even sleep with any of them, except the one whose face was so shy and sweet. Ah, he was a tiger in the darkness, wasn’t he! She had kept him for three days, but he
would
insist on singing his tunes to her, and so she sent him on his way.
    What was his name?
    She was on the verge of remembering who he was as she entered the house and heard a strange hooting sound from the back room. Like the baboons who lived across Little Lake, their pant-hoots as they babbled to each other in their nothing language. “Oh. Hoo. Oo-oo. Hoooo.”
    Only it wasn’t baboons, was it? And the sound came from the bedroom, up the winding stair, moonlight from the roof window lighting the way as Kokor rushed upward, running the stairs on tiptoe, silently, for she knew that she would find her husband Obring with some whore of his
in Kokor’s bed
, and that was unspeakable, a breach of all decency, hadn’t he any consideration for her at all? She never brought
her
lovers home, did she? She never let them sweat on
his
sheets, did she? Fair was fair, and it would be a glorious scene of injured pride when she thrust the little tartlet out of the house
without her clothes!
so she’d have to go home naked and then Kokor would see how Obring apologized to her and how he’d make it up to her, all his vows and apologies and whimpering but there was no doubt about it now, she would
not
renew him when their contract came up and then he’d find out what happens to a man who throws his faithlessness in Kokor’s face.
    In her moonlit bedroom, Kokor found Obring engaged in exactly the activity she had expected. She couldn’t see his face, or the face of the woman for whom he was providing vigorous companionship, but she didn’t need daylight or a magnifying glass to know what it all meant.
    “Disgusting,” she said.
    It worked just as she had hoped. They