The January Dancer

An Craic

“You have to admit,” the scarred man says, “to an element of farce to all this. The Hound had come sniffing after one secret and flushed out two others quite by chance.”

The harper plays with her strings, tuning them for her first set. Her head is bent, her ear close to the clairseach. She plucks an A, listens, turns a key to tighten the cord. “That’s the way of it among secrets,” she replies without looking up. “One thing leads to another. The secret of the Dancer to the secret of the phantom fleet to the secret of Peacock’s hidden holes. Sometimes I think there is only one secret, and all others are but manifestations of it, and if only we learned what that one secret is, we would know everything.”

The scarred man screws up his face. “That’s too mystical for me. I prefer the irony of chance to the certainty of myth. It was luck, not fate. When you have your eye fixed on one thing, it’s easy to stumble over others.”

The harper sets her harp aside. “The ‘certainty’ of myth?”

“Of course. You can have supreme confidence in a thing only when you don’t quite know what that thing is.”

“Really.” The harper considers that: what it may say about the universe; or at least about the part of it the storyteller occupies. “I’d have thought the opposite.”

“No.” The scarred man grows animated. His hands accentuate his words, fluttering, chopping like a meat cleaver on the tabletop, causing the morning bowls to dance. “The more you know a thing, the more you know how it can fail you. That’s why we fall in love with strangers—and grow estranged from our closest companions. ‘Ignorance begets confidence,’ an ancient god once said, ‘more often than does knowledge.’”

The harper shows her teeth. “You seem very confident of that.”

The scarred man’s laugh is like the rustle of ancient, long-dried leaves. “Very well. Let us leave the issue uncertain, and at least smile that Bridget ban struck a goal at which she hadn’t aimed.”

The harper brushes a glissando from her strings. “At least she struck a goal.” This, she punctuates with a single plucked note, high at the end of her harp. It lingers in the air between them.

“But later,” the scarred man foretells, “she lost what she had loved and the tragedy is that she never knew it.”

The harper’s smile fades and she lifts the harp to her lap and plays aimlessly for a time. “Why did they try to kill her?” she finally asks.

The scarred man studies her. His lips work as if tasting something. “Five uncharted roads on Electric Avenue? Unknown rivers of space leading to…Where? New worlds? Shortcuts to old ones? It was a secret worth killing for.”

“Provided you aren’t on the sharp end of the knife.”

He waves a hand, conceding the point. “What sacrifice goes willingly to the altar? The ’Cockers were terrified. Let word of such a prize leak out and every would-be highwayman in the Spiral Arm would cast his die to seize it. Perhaps even the Elders of Jehovah would stir at the thought of a rival so nearby. Certainly, the People of Foreganger would. The ’Cockers are clever and subtle and even dangerous in their quiet, treacherous way, but the ‘strong right arm’ is not their play and the wise man bets on the larger fleet. Who knows how many heads in their Halls of Remonstration once let slip the holes in Peacock’s sky through the hole in their face. Loose lips are best sewn shut forever.”

“There is not enough thread in the Spiral Arm for such embroidery,” the harper objects. “How many smugglers did they move over the years through those hidden channels? And none of them ever mentioned the clever way in which they laundered their cargo?”

The scarred man shrugs and looks about the Bar, where men and women laugh and trade stories and withhold secrets. “One hears a great many tales from captains in their cups. The stories move at a discount. But, no, the ’Cockers did the laundry themselves. Smugglers came to them, turned over their cargoes, and were paid ‘on the barrelhead,’ as the Terrans say. They might suspect a secret channel—most captains know of some here and there—but they would not know the currents, directions, loci, entry ramps, all those things needful for finding and using them. That was why Peacock could not let a Hound see the STC records. She’d learn not only that the roads existed, but also where they were.”

“Then it wasn’t the phantom fleet they were protecting, at all.”

“Not as such. I suspect they were surprised—and maybe even frightened—that the strangers knew one of their secret shortcuts. The ’Cockers told no one—but they forgot that holes often have two ends.”

“But why not lie? Tell her the fleet had come out of Route 66 or off the Spice Road from Jehovah. Then she’d leave and…Oh.”

“Yes. ‘Oh.’ She’d reach Foreganger or Jehovah and find that no such fleet had passed through there. There are nodes where trans-cooper traffic is not well tracked and passersby go unrecorded; but not at those two suns. She’d’ve been back in a fortnight or two, and not in the best of humors.”

“Then they ought to have had a false record already prepared against the day.”

“But they were ’Cockers, and forethought is not their métier. The need for a ‘second set of books’ was never urgent until it was critical. And then, when they were faced with it, they doubted their ability to fool a Hound. A quite reasonable doubt,” the scarred man adds with a smirk.

The harper finds a menacing chord and plays out, in theme and variations, the grim array of severed heads, stretching back and back into the dawn of the Peacock’s Era. Their world might be accounted a paradise, but paradises have always been bound by strict rules, the breaking of which means exile or death. But she follows it with a jaunty, triumphant strain as Bridget ban leaps though the backyards of Nolapatady. “So, she left Peacock Junction and followed the phantom fleet down a secret hole. But I had thought…”

“What?”

“That she and Hugh…and the others, of course…joined forces.”

“Because it would make a better story?” The scarred man rubs the side of his nose with a forefinger and works his lips. He looks to the side, as if he studies the scene, as if he sees it in his mind’s eye. “There is a move in shaHmat in which an opponent’s princess is blocked and each of her replies ends badly. Having asked for the records, Bridget ban could not now say, ‘Never mind,’ and leave. They would know she’d gotten the intelligence some other way, and the planetary defense batteries would take her out before she reached low orbit. She was clever and her ship was quick, but the god Newton is cruel, and they would pot her on the rise. Of course,” he adds cruelly, “she could not wait too long, either, or they would wonder at her patience. She was pinned like a butterfly on the Spaceport Hard. She dared not leave.”

“They would dare a Hound? Would panic overcome their common sense?”

The scarred man spreads his hands wide. “They have an excess of the former and a deficit of the latter. It is a world where impulse rules thought.”

“No matter,” the harper says, her fingers entangling an intricate and triumphant strain. “She was too clever for them. She will find a way.”

“How can you be certain?” he mocks. “Two of our players are already dead.”

But the harper makes no answer. The scarred man studies her closely. His eyes narrow and he allows himself a moment of wonder…But his uisce bowl is empty and the hum in the Bar is rising to midmorning volume. “Consider, then,” he says, “how suited she and Peacock were for each other.”

The harper arches an eyebrow in lieu of the question.

“Each one beautiful on the surface; each one deadly underneath.”