Page 155 of Envious Of Fire
Is that to indicate hunger? Salivating? Or is it something lions just do?
Why would Markadian orchestrate such a spectacle? Is this because Kaleb has done something wrong? Is this what Raya was warning him about? Are Markadian and his sister a sadistic pair of siblings who would lure an innocent musician like him into a deadly trap for their own amusement?
Could gods really be so cruel?
Kaleb finds himself struck suddenly by the calmness of the animal. What if he has this all wrong? Maybe the lion isn’t here to harm him. This could just be a surprise of Markadian’s to rouse the crowd, to make the violin performance more entertaining. Gods have strange appetites. They’re easily bored. Maybe this is just a part of the show, meant to impress Markadian’s friends. Kaleb wasn’t told so that he’d be genuinely surprised when the lion emerged. That must surely be the more sensible reason.
Even the audience seems to be waiting for something to happen. Maybe they are too afraid to shout anymore, worried they might spook the lion.
Is it blood or music they crave more?
Kaleb has stopped moving. He is facing the audience now, at the other end of the cage, with the lion’s shadow falling over his feet.
The shadow, of all things, makes Kaleb think of a spider.
A very large shadow of a seemingly large threat.
And he thinks of Markadian’s power.
Is this lion even real?
Kaleb makes a radical and entirely counterintuitive decisionto, with glacial speed, move toward the lion. When the lion’s tail twitches, Kaleb stops. Calm again, he risks another step.
Even the audience seems to hold their breath.
Are they thinking it, too? Are they seeing through the ruse?
Kaleb slowly lifts the bow of his violin. Excruciatingly slow. No part of him is completely certain of anything. He reaches the violin bow toward the lion like an extension of his own arm, patiently, carefully, dipping a toe into the water of his own little hypothesis, a dangerous but necessary experiment.
Confidence swells inside Kaleb’s chest as he faces the beast. He can’t believe his eyes. “You’re not real,” he says, breaking a smile, in total disbelief.
In a flash, the lion lifts his huge paw and swats at the bow with ferocious strength, claws cutting through air. It snaps out of Kaleb’s fingers like a splinter, flung aside, stunning him.
The lion’s next strike is directly across Kaleb’s face.
···
To the sound of Markadian’s ringing laughter, Kyle shouts as he barges between the tables, shoving anyone out of the way in pursuit of his brother.
Between fine dresses and suit jackets standing in the way, watching the scene with bloodlust in their hungry eyes, Kyle catches the horror onstage in nightmarish flashes.
The lion roaring, circling the cage, snapping its jaws.
Kaleb staggering backward blindly, hollering out in pain, blood pouring down his face from the attack.
Kyle reaches the stage at long last, grabs hold of the bars. “Kaleb!!” he yells, but is drowned out by the audience, shouting both in joy and in terror. Some of them cheer the violinist on, spitting words of encouragement, though it isn’t clear whether they’re mocking him. Others cheer for the lion, desperate for action, seeing it as part of the show, one of Markadian’s vulgarperformances, not realizing a real life hangs in the balance—or perhaps knowing fully and relishing in it.
Kyle grabs something off the nearest table, a blunt candle, and pitches it between the bars at the lion. “Hey!” he shouts, grabs something else, throws it too. “Over here, fucking lion!” He snatches a chair and starts beating it madly against the bars, again and again. “Here! To me! Hey!”
The lion turns his huge head, tail flicking irritably.
“Go!” cries out Kyle to his brother as he keeps his eyes on the lion, banging the cage with the chair over and over. “Up on the bars, if you can! Climb! Get off the ground, fast!” He starts thrusting the chair at the bars, the legs poking through. “Over here, you big fucking cat, over here!!”
Kyle feels his brother’s confusion and panic, blinded by the blood on his face, no idea how deeply the lion’s claws gouged, perhaps stunned he’s still alive. And it is with blind trust that he seizes the chance despite being entirely unaware of who it is that’s helping him, rushing to the farthest side of the stage to climb up the bars. Kyle’s heart pounds as his brother’s hands and feet slip over and over on his pursuit for higher ground.
It is truly Kaleb on that stage. His brother. His real, living, younger brother. Even his clumsiness is familiar, the same as it was when they were teens. The awkward way he grips the bars, in ways that Kyle would have once criticized and coached him through back in the day. How Kaleb is for whatever reason still clutching the neck of the violin with his free hand as if he still needs it, as if saving the instrument is just as important as his own life. His feet, the way they slip and slide down the bars as he climbs them, using every available part of his arms to gain purchase with little to no athleticism, zero grace, trying to hook one of them around the bars on his way up to the top where the bars start to curve. The cage looks over twenty feet tall. It is an unsettling height to hang from with nothing below to protectone’s fall except the jaws of a lion, yet there Kaleb bravely goes, climbing and climbing with all his might.
Kyle’s fascination is shattered by claws lunging out between the bars, causing him to fall back with the chair.
