The drinking with the few adventurous arbeiters and storytelling and drinking and gambling and more storytelling and more drinking went on until the sulfur winds began to howl against the titanium shutters, and then the young ones among us began pairing off with the most attractive locals we could cull from the herd.

Aglaé rarely stayed at these parties for long and never went off with locals, but Philp, Pig (our apprentice Pyk), red-haired Kyder, Coeke, Alleyn, Anne, Pope, Lana, the short Hywo, Gough. Tooley, and some of the rest of us each found someone eager to make the beast with two backs with a rare stranger to their world, and two by two, arbeiter and actor, like randy animals filing toward Noah’s Ark, we began slipping away from the ebbing party and heading for arbeiters’ hovels and barracks and outbuildings and barns.

In my case it was a barn.

We did it three times in the loft that night as the acid rains blew against the stone walls. (It would have been more times, but at age twenty, I’m not as young and resilient as I once was.) The barn held five animals (besides us)—a llama, a cow, a goat, and two chickens. None seemed bothered by our exertions or Larli’s loud cries.

Larli was the arbeiter girl who’d invited me home to her barrack’s barn. She was fairly typical for a postperformance fling girl: very young but old enough for me not to feel too guilty, curly hair, pretty eyes, broad shoulders, more muscles than I’d ever have, and hands so callused and strong that several times when I cried out, it was in pain not ecstasy.

She liked to talk and ask questions—also fairly typical for a postplay fling date—and I tried to stay awake and keep up my end of the conversation (since I was too tired to keep anything else up) as the wind and sulfur rain tore at the slate tiles above us.