Lasher

Twenty-eight

THE MUSIC CAME from electric mouths high up on the white walls. The people danced in the center of the room, awkwardly, rocking back and forth, but right with the music, as though they too loved it. The musicians were many, and they had crude instruments, nothing as beautiful as the bagpipes or the clarsach. It was as if she could hear that old music in this music, but the two were twined, and she could not think again. Just music. She saw the glen. She saw all the brothers and sisters dancing, and singing. And then someone pointed. The soldiers had come!

The band stopped. The silence clattered in on her. When the door opened, she jumped. People laughing inside, someone staring at her, a woman in a baggy sad dress.

She ought to go on to New Orleans. She had miles and miles to walk. She was hungry. She wanted some milk. They had food there but they didn’t have milk. She would have smelled it if they had it. But there were cows in the fields. She’d seen them, and she knew how to take the milk. She should have done it before now. How long had she been here listening to this music? It had all started so long ago, and she couldn’t remember, but this was just the first real day of her life.

When the sun had risen, she had opened the door of a small kitchen, and taken the milk from the refrigerator and drunk the whole container. That had been morning, the delicious taste of cold milk, and the warm yellow sun coming down in long slender dusty rays through the thin, dead-looking trees, and over the grass. Someone from the house had found her. She had said thank you for the milk. She was sorry it was all gone, but she had to have it.

In the long run, these things weren’t important. These people wouldn’t hurt her. They didn’t know what she was. In the old days, if you had stolen milk like that they would have run after you, chasing you deep deep into the mountains, maybe even…

“But all that is no longer important,” said Father. “This is our time to rule.”

Go now, to New Orleans. Find Michael for Mother. Yes, that is what Mother wanted with all her heart. Stop in the field where the cows stand in sleep, waiting for you. Drink the warm milk from the udder. Drink and drink and drink.

She turned, but the band started. Once more, the music. Warming it up with three or four notes and then pounding up through her shoes, and through her throat, as if she were breathing it in through the mouth. She closed her eyes, just loving it. Oh, the world is wondrous. She began to rock.

Someone touched her, and she turned and looked at a man who was almost as tall as she. Wrinkled and tan and smelling of smoke all over, an old being, in a dark blue shirt and pants stained with grease. He spoke to her but she could only hear the music, beating and beating. She rocked her head back and forth. This was lovely.

He leant over and said right in her ear:

“You been watching a long time, honey. Why don’t you come in and dance?”

She stepped back. It was so hard for her to keep her balance with this music. She saw him take her hand, felt his harsh dry fingers. All the tiny lines in his hands were full of grease. He smelled like the highway and the cars that shot by. He smelled like cigarettes.

She let him tug her gently through the door, into the warm enfolding light, where the people were dancing. Now the vibration passed all through her. She might have gone slack all over, and fallen down in a heap on the floor. There she could have lain forever listening and singing with it, seeing the glen. The glen was as beautiful as the island ever had been.

It was either that or pull herself together with it, dance and dance and dance.

That’s what they were doing; the man had begun to dance with her, had placed his arm around her waist and had come close to her. He said something. She couldn’t hear it. She thought it was “You smell good!”

She shut her eyes, and turned round and round, leaning on his arm, holding tight to him, tilting from side to side. The man was laughing. In a flash she saw his face, saw his mouth moving with words again. The music was thunderous. When she closed her eyes, she was back with the others, dancing in the circles, round and round, out from the stone circle, so many circles that those in the first could not see all the way to those in the last. Hundreds and hundreds dancing to the pipes and the harp.

Oh, but those were the first days, before the soldiers came.

In the glen, later, everyone danced together, tall and little and poor and rich, human and nonhuman. They had come together to make the Taltos. Many would die, but if the Taltos were made…If somehow there were two…She stopped, her hands to her ears. She had to go. Father. I’m coming. I’ll find Michael for Mother. Mother, I did not forget. I am not childish. All of you are simpletons, children! Help me.

The man pulled her off balance, but then she realized he was just trying to make her dance some more. Turning her, twisting her. She began again, sliding into it, loving it, rocking back and forth ever more violently, letting her hair swing.

Yes, love it. In a blur, she saw the real music makers. Scrawny and fat and wearing glasses over their eyes, they scratched at their fiddles, and sang in high voices, through their noses, rapidly, unintelligibly, and they played a little bellows organ of which she did not know the name. That was something not inside her, that word. Or the word for the mouth instrument, like the Jew’s harp, which wasn’t quite the same. But she loved this music, she loved the insistent pulse of it, the divine monotony, the buzz all through her limbs. It seemed to tap on her eardrums, to tap on her heart, to freeze her and consume her.

As in the glen, these humans here danced-old women, young women, boys and men. Even little children. Look at them. But these people couldn’t make the Taltos. Get to Father. Get to…

“Come on, honeybabe!”

Something…a purpose. Leave here. But she couldn’t think while the music went on, and it didn’t matter.

Yes, let him make her twirl. Dance. She laughed delightedly. How good it felt. Now was the time for dancing. Whoa! Dance. Father would understand.