The January Dancer

An Craic

The harp thunders savage chords and the men and women in the Bar of Jehovah sing and roar with it. The harper has abandoned her table with the scarred man and resumed her place in the corner. Fists pound tables; voices join in chorus. She stops, and voices boil in protest. One more! Just one more! The Bartender watches with approval. This is more like it! Geantraí. Something glorious and triumphant to lift the spirits!

But, instead, she gentles them with suantraí for a horse ridden hard must be cooled afterward by a hot-walker. Peaceful strains soothe excited nerves; tones of bliss bless dreamy joy. These, too, the Bartender regards with favor, so the harper improvises a transient motif from the goltraí solely to wipe his smile away with a finger’s brush of loss and desolation. But it is a trick sorrow, not the real thing. The Bartender sees that it is a joke, and grins across the room. They understand each other. She closes with a rollicking march and once more the spacers in the Bar respond with stamping feet. But it is lagniappe and she has gentled them and now when she rises from her stool, they let her go.

The scarred man is waiting in his alcove with a smile she had not thought his face capable of making. “You know how to work them, darlin’,” he says with admiration. “There is something of the Dancer in you, I think. You command, and they respond. Is that why you play? For the sense of power?”

“You confuse consequence with intention. My talent lets me pluck their hearts with my own nails, but I don’t play to play with their hearts.”

“I should hope not,” says the scarred man. “Nails leave scars.”

The harper turns and makes a sign to the Bartender. “I’ll play once more before I go.”

“Yes. It’s hard to put the scepter down.” He smiles as if at a secret joke: his lips stretch and his eyes turn inward.

The harper thinks suddenly that her companion might have been a handsome man in his youth, before what had happened happened, and that within this sour old man had once lived a sour young one. (Sweetness was something she would not credit.) Almost, she asks what tragedy had reduced his body to such ruin; and she forbears only because prowling old ruins can be dangerous. They are full of deadfalls and uneasy masonry; and wild things have crept inside.

“So the Fudir did believe in the Dancer, after all,” she said.

“Why suppose he believed in anything?”

“No one chases off to the Hadramoo on speculation. I confess, I thought at first he wanted only high-level access on New Eireann for some criminal plan—a ‘scramble,’ they call it—and Hugh was his tool to gain it.”

“And the legend was his tool to gain Hugh? No, the Fudir was as twisted as the Dancer, but in those days there were still a few things he believed in. If one belief was a mad fancy, what of it? Tell me you’ve no mad fancies. Tell me you’d no other motive in coming here than to pick the tale of the Dancer off my teeth.”

The harper does not answer for a while and she brushes her strings gently with the back of her nails and they sigh in glissando. “And what of January,” she says. “Surely, he had more right to the Dancer than the Fudir.”

But the scarred man shakes his head. “What has right to do with any of it? If only they’d wondered about the chair; or if Hugh hadn’t had, as the Terrans like to say, ‘a big mouth.’”

“What chair?”

The scarred man signals the bartender for another bowl. The harper is paying, so why not? “One player is nearer his goal, at least,” he says when the drink has been delivered.

The harper cocks his head. “You mean Little Hugh?”

The scarred man laughs.