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mess, and you can go talk with the madam. Do you know the way to her
room?"
"No, I am afraid I have not had that pleasure," Feltheryn answered in
his most courtly fashion as he stood from the little table.
"Then I'll have one of the girls show you," she said, beginning quickly
to clean as she had said she would. "Shawme! Shawme, would you please
show Master Feltheryn up to Myrtis's room? I sent word up to her that
he was here."
Shawme, a mere child whose blue eyes held inordinate pride, smiled at
Feltheryn and led him up the stairs. A moment later he was seated in a
THE INCOMPETENT AUDIENCE 437
small parlour, explaining his needs to Myrtis, the proprietrix of the
Aphrodisia House, and sipping the blackberry tea she provided.
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" so you see, lovely lady," he finished, "she must be talented and
willing to leam to act if she cannot, and reasonably beautiful, but she
must also have the sort of figure which lends itself to wearing men's
clothing. For most of the play she must be disguised as a man, and it
must not appear laughable that she is so disguised. The audience will
suspend its disbelief to see a young girl in tight pants, but it will not
accept a full-blown womanly figure in the same outfit. I very much want
to do the play, but without your help I fear I cannot."
Myrtis laughed-
"My dear Feltheryn! The fact is, there are plenty of people running
around this town in the clothes of the opposite sex, and most of them are
women. For some strange reason they assume cross-dressing to be the
one way in the world they can protect their precious chastity. Not that I
am in any wise tolerant of any man abusing a woman, mind you, but
really, there are so many other and better ways of preventing rape! Why,
you will never find a softer, more engagingly femimne roster of ladies
than reside within my walls; but any one of them could tell you a dozen
ways to keep a man in place if he tried to take something that wasn't his.
Yet it is not the lovely, soft, delicate ones who worry, and who sometimes
should. It is those hard, intolerant women: the ones with some kind of
chip on their shoulder. They never in their lives have tried to make
themselves attractive to men, yet they assume they are irresistible to
anything on three legs. Ha! They should try working here, coaxing some
poor merchant to arousal who is more worried about whether the money
is well spent than whether he is having a good time! But beyond that,
these women have gone to extremes to make themselves less than attrac-
tive to men, have often learned some devastating martial an in response
to their fear, and they have acquired manners that would get them barred
from my house if they were men; and still, they go through life assuming
that rape is around every corner! So they disguise themselves as men, and
spend most of their life energy worrying about whether they will be
found out. It saddens me deeply, A woman should live her life going
forward at full charge, not cringing back in fear of something that may
never happen."
"But Myrtis," said Feltheryn, "some women do get raped."
"Well of course they do!" said the madam- "And some get murdered
and some get robbed and some get tortured and a great many are beaten
by their husbands in the cozy confines of respectable marriage. By far the
greatest number of women die in childbirth! But life is about living. Mas-
ter Player, not about the piddling little moment at the end when you die.
438
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STEALERS' SKY
Oh, some of these fearful women are dear friends of mine, and I try to
understand. But it does seem foolish to put such a high value on rape
when a woman in this town is far more likely to be robbed or murdered.
What a rapist seeks to take he really cannot, unless the woman lets him;
and that is not her body, but her dignity. She may not like the physical
part, it may sit with her like a canker for her lifetime if she lets it; but
frankly, nobody can use my body to humiliate me. I am flesh, but I am
more than that. I am a woman, and inordinately proud of the fact, and
neither pain nor humiliation can touch that. Besides, men get raped too,
so it's not much of a disguise in the long run. In fact, in Sanctuary,
disguising yourself as a goat wouldn't be much better!"
"I had heard that goat rape was up," Feltheryn said.
"Only since the influx of all those foreigners who are working on the
walls." Myrtis smiled. "But getting back to the point, I do believe I have
someone in mind who might fill the bill. Her name is Sashana. Her family
was killed by Raggah in the desert. She hid among the dunes, and then,
being very young, managed to pass as a boy with the next caravan that
came by. It was sensible in those circumstances, but now she lives and
dresses as a woman. In fact, such a charming woman that I have often
wished her fortunes had been a little worse when she came to Sanctuary.
She would have made me a bundle! I'll give you her address, and a letter
introducing you. She does not disguise herself anymore, but she doesn't
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