The January Dancer

An Sos

But a woman who has in her something of the strider does not hesitate at the brink. What chasm can be crossed in two steps? She enters the Corner and immediately it is as if the world has changed. The paving grows irregular, then crumbles, then ceases to exist at all. Streets become alleys and gullies, some too narrow for vehicles, or even for fat Jehovah merchants. Stairs clamber the sides of Mount Tabor. Most of them switch-back to take the bite out of the pitch, but many others are an undaunted climb straight up the slope. The different ways the scarred man might have gone increase like loaves and fishes with every stride she takes.

She comes at last to a sort of plaza—if such a broad and open term does grace for such a constricted space—and here she stops. The plaza is bordered by gloaming buildings, each four or five stories high, some with windows, most presenting blank backs to the outer world. They are the color of sand and dirt, and indeed many of them appear to have been built from that most common of materials—and are now reverting to their original state. It is more like a close room than a public square, and lacks only a roof to complete the illusion. In the center, a fountain gurgles. The water is nearly the same color as the surrounding buildings, and has left brown stains in the stone of the basin. Water drools like venom from a stone cobra’s mouth, lacking the pressure head for any more vigorous jet. The cobra is erect and flaring, and on his coils sleeps a recumbent man cut from the same dull stone.

No less than seven exits cleave the wall of buildings, ranging from pedestrian walkways wide enough for two men to pass each other to narrow cracks between the buildings through which most men might not pass at all. Each path is of rammed earth; each is accented with raddī-piles of rubbish and flat pans of cracked mud where the heat has sucked fetid pools dry. She goes to the mouth of each in turn and finds no sign that the scarred man has passed that way.

In despair, she returns to the fountain. She had let her tongue slip its leash. Now, whatever the scarred man may think, there will be things to her forever unknown.

There is no one about to ask, even assuming Terrans would answer a stranger’s queries, or answer them honestly. It is mid afternoon and the plaza is deserted. She had not expected sunlight in the secular world. The Bar is timeless, and had promised night outside. The Corner, too, is timeless, but in another sense, for here the Past never dies, while in the Bar, the future never comes. But the deserted quality of the early-afternoon plaza is unnerving and she imagines a faerie host, lurking just out of sight, and watching. She does not know the Terran custom of vatyum, the sesta, or sixth “hour” of their day.

Yet not everyone slumbers during the heat of the day, and there are always some who really do lurk and watch. These idlers had faded into byways and gullies at her approach. Who knew who this confident strider might be? Better to avoid trouble by avoiding contact. And so, emptiness had opened before her path as the waters part before the bow of a swift ship.

But let motion cease and the waters close in.

A furtive shift in an airyway; a shadow down a dark colonnade. She senses them gathering at the borders of her vision. Beggars, thieves, urchins, those who for one reason or another find sleep discomfiting and so haunt the afternoon.

The harper slides her case from her shoulder and eases herself onto the flat stone rim of the fountain. The slabs are rough and cool; at her back the turgid waters mutter. A man in a kaftan stands at the mouth of one of the gullies. It is one that doglegs a short distance in, and there might be an army of such men just past that concealing corner. An old woman leans two-handed upon a stout walking staff in a doorway that had seemed closed. Someone whistles two or three notes, like a signal. Unseen feet scamper down an arcade. The harper bends and opens her case and sets the harp upon her lap.

Three small children, pale-skinned beneath the grime of the streets, have come out of the narrow arcade, and they bend and whisper to one another, lifting their heads in her direction now and then. The oldest, a tall, skinny boy of perhaps thirteen metric years, towers above them. He slaps one of the younger on the side of the head and the smaller boy grins at him.

The harper tunes her strings to the Descending Doric mode. In the gully, the kaftan man uses a knife to slice a guava and lifts the piece to his lips on the blade. He has been joined by a second man, this one clad only in a light blue checkered dhoti, which displays thereby a torso evident of a sensual life, for he is soft and fleshy and his pendulous lips quiver as they watch the harper. The man with the knife pays him no mind, but cuts another slice off the guava while he watches her.

No one has yet made a sound, and so the first chords the harper plays explode in the silence. Heads half-tucked jerk up. The children—five now—unknot themselves and face her. A shutter on an upper-story window creaks open a crack. She plays the hexachord to limber her fingers. The man in the dhoti wanders casually into the plaza, pointedly looking everywhere but at the harper. The man with the knife follows him. A rheumy-eyed beggar walking with the aid of a wooden crutch hobbles from the shadows in a corner of the square. He holds his bowl before him, shaking it so she can hear that it does not rattle. Three men variously dressed in Terran “business suits” squat along one of the buildings and confer in low whispers with one another. One of them laughs.

She plays the Dancer theme that she developed on the first day. It is more fully realized now, less uncertain. But it starts quietly and most of those in the plaza do not yet hear it. The adolescents nudge one another and finally push forward one of their number, who stumbles a little in the harper’s direction, looks back over his shoulder, then approaches, his hand thrust deeply in a pocket of his robe. He fingers something, and the harper notes from the drape of the cloth that it is shaped like the barrel of a gun.

The music builds in volume and tempo. The stately quadrille begins to break into wilder beats: a gallop below which her thumb strikes a thumping bass of thunder. More windows have opened on those facades possessing them. One of the men squatting against the wall—he has a face like a vulture—has risen, and he comes to stand beside her, but a little behind, just out of her vision. “Sweet,” she hears him say, but whether sincere or sarcastic—or even whether directed to the music—she does not know. The man with the guava cuts a final slice and wipes his hand on his shirt and his sleeve across his lips. He studies her and gauges the clothing, the harp, the scrip belted to her waist.

The pock-faced youth before her pulls the tube from his pocket. Her fingers falter just a moment and for the first time in many years she strikes a false note. But the boy has pulled out a Terran tinwissle—a simple tube with finger-holes and a whistled mouthpiece—and after a moment’s further hesitation, he begins to play against her, picking up the dance as it whirls into a reel, pulling it up above her register and spinning it free. He is not a terribly good player and his fingers often hold a note rather than dare dance it in thirty-seconds, but he stays close to her—and he has heard the tune only once. His friends cheer him and he blushes and loses the tempo, pauses, then picks it up again.

The vulture-faced man tosses a few coins into the open harp case.

More upper-story windows are open now, and in one of them a blowsy, large-breasted woman leans on the sill, listening. The children, the ones who had pushed the piper forward, are dancing now, ring-a-rosie. A few people jostle and shove in the small crowd that now surrounds the harper. Now and then, a coin rings in the harp case. Not all smile. Some eye her with suspicion, or even hostility. One man, seizing the advantage of the sudden audience, juggles balls in the air by the arcade; another, seizing the same opportunity, moves about, lightening purses until an onlooker on a balcony spies him and raises the hue-and-cry, and the man plies swift heels for the nearest airyway with others in hot pursuit. The harper mocks his flight with galloping strings before resuming the geantraí.

She shifts tempos abruptly, confusing the dancing children and the piper, who takes his whistle from his lips and listens to the new melody, nodding his head to the beat until he can pick it up once more. She plays January’s Song and then the Lament for Little Hugh. The latter stills the jostling crowd, and the piper trills a high sweet melody of his own above the weeping strings. The harper finds his melody attractive and brings it down to a lower register with intricate glissandos and grace notes, runs some variations on it, then, with a nod to the boy, gives it back to him, its sweetness now shaded with poignancy. When she segues to Death in the Gully and introduces The Fudir’s Theme, she uses a mode beyond both the piper’s kenning and the bore of his whistle. It is a minor key, and he has not a second pipe. His high, pure piccolo notes still, leaving only the darker thrumming of the clairseach’s metal strings. It is only coincidence that clouds pass before the afternoon sun and cast a sudden shadow on the square.

No one dances now. Few dare breathe.

A man with a tabla has pushed through the press and sits now at her feet, with his hands poised over the drumhead; but he dares not strike, for such a melody flows beatless toward a distant ocean. It is not the alap with which he is familiar, but the long line of an ancient poetry in a forgotten country of green downs and chalk cliffs. It is a murmur of their spirit that has survived the ages.

The harper whispers sixteen to seven to the tabla man and dee to the young piper and, at her nod, tin whistle soars and hands patter in drut-laya and the dark thrumming strings burst into sunshine. Triumph! The treacher tricked! The audience cannot restrain a shout and the children leap and clap and pick up their dance where it had fallen. The vulture-faced man nods, as if passing judgment. Yes, it is exactly right. Nothing has ever so sweet a taste as after despair.

She will not take them further, not to the desolation of the Rift or the Rieving of New Eireann, not to the hall of heads on Peacock Junction. It is too bright an afternoon for that. She gives them a sample of Bridget ban’s theme—it is not yet fully realized—and allows the music to fade into the mysteries, into diminished sevenths, before stilling her strings.

The tabla man grunts with satisfaction and the young piper grins. The crowd murmurs its satisfaction—it is not their way to clap hands—and they begin to break up. The young boy holds his tinwissle up to her in both hands and the harper, remembering a story she once heard from a Terran “saxman” on Jenjen’s Khōyāstan, takes it in her own hands and gravely kisses it before giving it back to him. The boy backs two solemn steps away and then boyishness triumphs and he turns and rushes to rejoin his companions.

The harper has thought that in such a mood the locals might answer her questions, but when she mentions the scarred man, they turn away and begin chattering among themselves. The sesta is past and the plaza begins to fill with the usual late-afternoon bustle of people busily going nowhere in particular.

“I take you, missy.”

It is the jowly man in the blue-checked dhoti. His smile is oily; his lip wet with perspiration. “Scar-head, me, goombah. I take you him.” His eyes are harder than his smile and they smolder. The harper hesitates. “Chel, Memsahb,” he says. “He no long one place.”

“Give me one minute.” The harper bends to put the harp back in its case and notices with no surprise that the modest pile of coins that had gathered there is now gone.

But when she straightens, harp case now slung over shoulder, the man in the dhoti stands with a fixed, glassy smile, looking past her. “No, missy. So sorry. Not know him, scar-head.” He turns and walks away and the man behind him, who had eaten the guava, now puts his knife away. He bobs his head to her. “We watch ’um, such men, no touch women. E’en so, eetee woman.”

Then, he, too, turns and walks away.

The harper sits suddenly on the edge of the fountain.

“We don’t know how you came this far,” says the scarred man, who is sitting on the other side of the fountain, his back to her. He rises and comes around to sit beside her. “That was a fool’s play. How did you ever hope to find us?”

“It can’t be so foolish as all that, seeing that I have.”

The scarred man grunts. “He heard you playing that theme, and we knew you’d stuck your head in the lion’s mouth.”

“That’s why I played. You can’t catch a man by chasing him. Better betimes to remain still, and he will come to you.”

Several loiterers had edged closer to them and the scarred man jumps suddenly to his feet and cries, “Yo, skevoose! Go see where you gotta be. Scat, before I give you leather in the kuli.” They slink off and he resumes his seat. “Pay the illiewhackers no mind.” He strikes his fist into his palm and rubs it. “Why did you come after me? What is it that she wants?”

“She?”

He turns red-rimmed rheumy eyes on her. “Your mother. The witch.”

“She didn’t send me.”

“No?”

“I’m chasing her, too.”

The scarred man digests that a time in silence. “I see,” he says at length, “that is the ‘One Thing’ that you have loved and lost.”

“Not a thing, a person.”

“And there’s no music for that, is there?”

“Your story’s not at an end yet. And at the end of your story I may hope to find the beginning of mine. What is the second way? In what other way may we speak of the story’s end?”

They sit side by side now, no table between them, but neither do they face each other. “An end,” the scarred man says. “There are qualities each story must possess, and when it has them it has been perfected. However good or bad the story may be, when it has all the qualities it needs to be itself, what can change accomplish but to lose one of them, and so become something less.” He inclines his head toward the harp case, which she has once more slid from her back. It rests now between her knees. “What you played here this afternoon…You will never again play it without remembering this day, without comparing it to this day, and it will never sound half so fine on your fingertips as it did here in a dusty, closed-in plaza of the Corner of Jehovah. You and others may play it from now until the Heat Death, but in that way, it has come to its end. From now on, it will always be a reprise.”

In answer, she recites a proverb: “‘A tune is more lasting than the song of the birds.’”

Perforce, he must complete it: “‘And a word is more lasting than the wealth of the world.’”

“What are those words, seanachy? Your story has yet to perfect itself.”

“What has she already told you?” he asks. “How does her version run?”

But the harper only shakes her head and stares silently at the windowless building before her. Eventually, the scarred man grunts. “I’ve never seen any reason for self-deception,” he says. “But she spent her whole life deceiving people. Why should she have exempted herself?”

“You don’t know that,” the harper says without looking at him. “I knew a different woman, sweet, gentle, but always with a sadness beneath her smile. It was a wan smile, the ghost of a smile. You had to look twice to see that it was there. But once you saw it…”

The scarred man nods slowly. “Aye. I knew her long ago, and what man or woman is only one man or woman? She had a god who was supposed to be three without being more than one; but she put her god to shame with the multitude she comprised.” He turns his head and his eyes pin her. “Are you certain you want to know how this ends?”

“It’s why I came.”

“It may also be why you go.”

She thinks for a moment, then nods her head slowly. “It may. But the question is: To where?”