Like the Actors Onstage
I enjoyed a stroke of good fortune today, and I decided to invite my friend to join me.
“A play?” Erich asked.
“That’s right,” I said. “My master gave me these and said I need to take a break sometimes.”
The two vouchers I had in hand were a reward for an especially well-written essay. My master had given them to me expecting I’d take a friend, but it was only recently that this sort of kindness had become easy to accept.
Nowadays, I had someone to invite. Not having to sit by a spot left empty from an unused ticket was such a blessed feeling.
“Are you sure?” Erich asked as he prepared some red tea in his kitchen. “Tickets to a play don’t come cheap.”
“It isn’t a fancy theater or anything. I wouldn’t have even accepted these if they were for a magic lantern show, but they’re for a more casual place.”
I showed him the tickets to ease his fears: there were two imperial theaters granted to the public by the crown, and these were for one of them. Even commoners could enjoy a performance there if they were willing to save up a bit.
To begin with, I wasn’t brave enough to try and watch a show put on by aristocrats for social purposes, or set foot in the kind of auditorium reserved for state-sponsored opera crews to entertain foreign diplomats. Wearing my everyday robe would get me kicked out for being an eyesore anyway.
Our destination came with far less anxiety. We would never go on our own dime, since we’d need to cough up silver pieces, but acting brought sagas to life more than a lone minstrel could. Erich and I had similar tastes; I had a feeling he’d appreciate the play they were putting on.
“Oh, it’s the saga of Jeremias and the Holy Sword!”
“That’s right,” I nodded. “It’s the second act—The Falls of Mourning. Pretty cool, huh?”
The story followed Jeremias as he received a sword and mission from the heavens. Persecuted as a heretic in a foreign land, he set off on an odyssey to save his disgraced god. The popular tale arose from events that had occurred in the short period between the Age of Gods and Age of Antiquity, and the second act was particularly well-known in the long, multipart epic.
“It really is,” he agreed. “I’m imagining the way my brother’ll just writhe with envy when I write to him about it.”
Ticket in hand, my friend began to recount his childhood memories with a great big smile. Apparently, his older brother had always wanted to lead their party as Jeremias whenever they played adventurers.
“O God, mine eye I render gladly to the rapids should it lift a thimble’s weight of sorrow from your daughter’s soul. Guilt take thee not, for this is mine own will.”
Erich pretended to gouge an eye as he put verse to sonorous melody. Jeremias was said to be a black-haired mammoth of a man, so he didn’t fit the part with his shining golden hair; still, his acting was quite something.
The heroine of the tale was a saint serving a foreign deity, to whom Jeremias offered his eye to free the woman of a curse. Taken by his self-sacrifice, she asked to accompany him on his journey; the scene was exceptionally famous for the moment she swore in her heart that she would spend the rest of her life repaying him.
I responded with a snippet from the saint’s soliloquy: “If ever harmed he be, I am his shield always. If night should rob his will, I am his warmth. If hardship rears its head, I stand with him beside. Not life of mine nor heart makes fair his missing eye.”
Her oath remained forever unspoken: she simply offered to join him for a time as a minor repayment for his kindness. Through their short time together, the saint had seen through Jeremias’s morality. Although she considered herself no more than a pawn whose greatest worth was to die for his sake, she realized that to say that aloud would cause the hero to slip away in the night to prevent her from spending her precious life on him.
What a heartrending way to love.
Perhaps one day I too would come to understand what let her throw herself into the raging ocean without hesitation.
For a while, we bandied lines back and forth. I would have died of shame had these not been excerpts from a poem, but as it stood, it was all fun and games.
Come to think of it, there had been a boy in my own hometown who’d gotten a little too wrapped up in his Jeremias act. He’d always worn an eyepatch even though he hadn’t needed it, and he’d only stopped when his dubious depth perception led him to tumble straight into a vat of fertilizer.
Listening to the stories was well and good, but showy looks were best suited to fiction. In that sense, maybe that boy had been lucky to learn his lesson so young. If someone were to ask me to wear the outfits actors wore on stage at my age...I would probably die of disgrace.
“Man, I’m really looking forward to this.”
“Me too. I don’t think I could ever wear any of that stage costuming, but seeing them is a lot of fun.” I laughed and added, “It must take a lot of confidence to go out in public wearing something like that, huh?”
However, my comment didn’t quite get the desired response... In fact, I had never seen Erich make the face he was making now. It was somewhere between a frown and mourning: his lips pursed like he’d eaten something sour, and his eyes glanced away like he had something to hide.
“Er... Old pal?” I asked. “Did I say something weird?”
“No, uh, well—it isn’t your fault... Just forget about it.”
That’s a tall order, I thought.
I tried a few more times to see if I could do anything to help him with his troubles, but he kept insisting that there wasn’t anything wrong with a half-hearted smile.
Uh... Hrm... I wonder what got under his skin?
Erich was still trying to lift himself up by talking about how excited he was for the play. For now, I figured the best I could do was treat him to dinner.
[Tips] Plays performed on stage instead of in open-air public spaces are considered a luxury among the common folk of the Empire.
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