The January Dancer

An Craic

“A stone scepter that compels obedience to its holder?” The harper allows incredulity to speak for her.

“So the Fudir thought at the time. A flimsy notion built from half-believed myths. He might not have crossed the Spiral Arm to check it out; but New Eireann wasn’t that far from Jehovah, so what the hell? If he was wrong, what was lost but a little time?”

“Another short, hopeless civil war among the Eireannaughta?” the harper guesses at other losses. She leans forward over the table and adds in a harder voice than she has used up to then: “But what matter is that if absolute obedience might be won?”

“Don’t be a fool, harper. Little Hugh was going back to the Vale. Nothing could have stopped him short of death. He had promised on his father’s name. So the only real question was when he would return, and how.”

“That’s two questions.”

“No, because the when dictates the how. Had the Dancer been a myth, it would have made no difference to what happened. But if it were true after all, there needn’t be blood at all.”

“No. Only blind obedience. I’d rather see the blood.”

“Yes, so long as it’s someone else’s.”

The shot tells. The harper falls silent and her fingers touch idly the frame of her clairseach. Ideals in the abstract may be held abstractly, but the devil is always in the details.

“None of which,” the harper says at last, “tells us why the Fudir decided to help Hugh.”

The man leans back into the alcove and laughter emerges from shadows even as he recedes into them. “You don’t get answers this soon in a tale, even if you had the question right.”

“This is an intermezzo then,” she says, “a bridge.” She plays an aimless conjunction of music, a strain that summarizes what has gone before and promises newer tropes to come after.

“If you wish,” the scarred man says. “But there is a notion that nothing ever happens on a bridge, and that is wrong. People jump off them.”

The harper places her instrument once more upon the table and the silence, now that her fingers have ceased their continuo, is louder than her music had been. “Now you mock,” she says. “Word games. Do you mean that O’Carroll trusted the Fudir too much?”

“Or that he trusted him too little. That’s a delicate point, don’t you think? But—and maybe you haven’t noticed this, either—the Fudir had to trust O’Carroll, too. Up to a point. The question is, was it to the same point? But, come, drink!” He raises his uisce bowl on high. “Drink to the quest!”

The harper disagrees. “The quest itself means nothing. The heart of the matter is Jason—and Medea—not the Fleece. The Argonauts could have sought anything, and their fates would have been the same.”

The scarred man strikes the tabletop with the flat of his hand, and the bowls and the tableware—and a few nearby drinkers—jump a little. “No! What you seek determines how you fail. Had Jason sought a Tin Whistle or an Aluminum Coffeepot instead of a Golden Fleece, the failure would have run quite differently.”

“More melodiously in the first case,” the harper allows, “and with greater alertness in the second. But, must it always end in failure?”

“Always.”

“Your cynicism extracts a price. You can never know the thing in itself, because you always look past it for a hidden reality. I would think all failures alike. Coffeepot or Golden Fleece, failure means you haven’t obtained what you sought.”

“No,” the scarred man answers mockingly. “Each failure is inevitably, enormously different from all the others. Each man who seeks does so for a different reason, and so can fail in a different way. Hercules failed in the quest for the Fleece; but his failure was of a different sort than Jason’s.”

“Jason secured the Fleece,” the harper points out.

“That was his failure.”