Chapter 202: The stage is ready

When he woke, the light in the window had turned from white to gold.

He lay still for a moment, listening. The house was quiet. A pot lid rattled once in the kitchen, and there was the faint sound of a woman humming under her breath, badly, as if she did not know she was doing it. The blanket had been pulled up to his chin. He had not done that himself.

’Four hours,’ said Medusa. ’Nothing came near the house.’

’Good.’

Leon sat up. A scrap of paper had been left on the arm of the sofa, and he picked it up. It was written in a neat, quick handwriting.

’I had to go get something, I’ll be back in a few hours. The news of your ranking is also all over the news, the association says the ceremony stage is finished.’

He read it twice, and then he found a pencil on the shelf by the window, and wrote underneath it. Thank you for the sofa. Ill be leaving now

He left it where she would find it. Then he put his coat on, let himself out through the back door, and went to see the arena that the Association had built for him.

***

The Meridian Arena stood on a headland at the eastern edge of the city, and from the sea road it looked like a bowl that some giant had set down on the grass.

Leon stood at the bottom of the hill and looked up at it.

It was a huge, round structure of pale stone, with tiers of seats that climbed in rings toward a rim hung with banners.

Forty thousand people could sit inside it. The Association used it for the national trials and for the funerals of great players, and now it was going to be used for him.

Workmen swarmed over the outer walls on rope ladders, hanging gold cloth and white cloth in long swags. A line of carts waited at the gate with lamps and carpets and crates of flags.

"It is bigger than I thought," he said.

’It is built to be seen from the sea,’ Medusa replied. ’That is the point of it.’

’Everything about this is built to be seen.’

’You asked for a public ceremony.’

’I asked for a public ceremony,’ Leon agreed, ’because I wanted every player in the country to see that the bounty was gone. I did not ask for a building the size of a small town.’

’Milda is a woman who likes to make a point.’

’So I am learning.’

The ceremony was two days away, and Milda had promised that nothing would be hidden from him. He wanted to see the stage before anyone else could change it.

He had left the Hermes book open on the arm of the sofa, and he thought of it for a moment longer than he meant to.

Now he walked up the hill with his hood down and his hands in his pockets, and nobody stopped him.

A pair of guards at the gate looked at his face, and then looked at each other, and then looked away with great care.

He supposed that the order to leave him alone had come down from above. He gave them a friendly nod as he went by, and one of them nodded back before he could stop himself.

Inside, the arena was a hive of noise.

Carpenters hammered at the tiers. Women on ladders were stringing paper lanterns along the walls.

A man with a clipboard was shouting at another man with a clipboard about the number of chairs in the press box.

Somewhere in the stands, a boy was learning to play a horn and was doing it badly. The floor of the arena was a wide oval of packed sand, and in the middle of it, raised on a platform of dark timber, was the stage.

Leon stopped at the edge of the sand and studied it.

It was a fine piece of work. The platform was a hundred feet across and rose about as high as a man’s chest, with a broad set of steps on each side and a gold-and-white canopy strung over the center on four tall poles.

At its heart stood a plain wooden dais, and behind the dais hung a banner of white silk with a single great letter on it.

SSS.

It hung there, enormous and gleaming, waiting for a man to stand under it.

’That is a nice banner,’ said Medusa.

’It is a very large letter.’

’It is an ambitious one.’

’I have never thought of myself as ambitious,’ Leon said. ’I think of myself as realistic.’

’You are the only person I have ever met who can say that with a straight face.’

He grinned, and walked across the sand.

A foreman looked up as he approached. He was a stocky man in a leather apron, and he had a pencil behind his ear and a rolled-up plan under his arm. His eyes went wide, and the plan slid from under his arm and hit the ground.

"You," he said.

"Good morning."

"You’re the lad from the board!"

"I was," said Leon. "I am not anymore."

"But you’re... you’re..." The foreman looked wildly around the arena, as though he expected a gang of bounty players to rise out of the sand.

"They told us you might come. They said that you’d want to look at the stage. They said that we weren’t to stop you."

"That was kind of them."

"Is there... is there something you would like to see?"

"Only the stage," Leon said pleasantly. "I will not be long."

The foreman nodded several times, very fast, and then he picked up his plan and retreated across the sand with the air of a man who had just been let off the gallows.

Leon watched him go. He found, to his own surprise, that he did not mind the effect. It was rather like being a very large dog that had learned to be gentle.