The January Dancer

An Craic

“It’s to be a geantraí, then,” the harper says. “A joyous stain. A triumphant escape from the unknown—and with the prize in hand!” She has uncased her harp, and setting it upon her lap, it sings the happy tune her fingers pry from it. About the room, men, half listening, smile without quite knowing why; and one (a woman, of course) frowns and turns toward the darkened alcove, as if seeking the source of such unwonted delight.

The scarred man grins, though the rictus is joyless. It is the smile more grieving than sorrow; the delight that is dark as despair. “Beginnings often are,” he says. “Otherwise, who’d go on? Sorrow is for conclusions, not commencements.”

The geantraí grows hesitant, pivots from the third mode into the darker fourth, hints at sorrow underneath the joy. But, then…

She lays her palm flat across the strings, silencing them, and those in the room—other than the scarred man, who is impervious to all music—sigh a little from apprehensions released. Music has charms, but it is not always charming.

“No,” says the harper. “That’s a cheat. That’s seeing the past with the eyes of the future, which is why the past is never quite seen correctly. Let them have their gaiety. No one ever knows it’s only a beginning they have. Let them be in their moment. The past must be seen as if it were still present, and the future all possibilities.”

The grin of the scarred man is not pleasant. “As if Tristam might yet succeed? But it’s over. It’s done. What happened, happened and you can’t change it. There is no moment without a future in its gravid belly. No tragedy issues but from the womb of the happiness that bore it.”

The harper’s smile is brighter, more pleasant, more deadly. “And ulta-pulta,” she answers. “Topsy-turvy. Yin-and-yang. Sorrow births joy.” Her fingers tickle the harp, which laughs in reprise of Tristam’s theme. “He did succeed. Tristam’s death was his triumph.”

The scarred man grunts. “He might liefer have failed, then.”

The harper forbears to argue the point. The scarred man has confused triumph with survival and she has no wish to antagonize him, not before she has sucked the wellspring dry of its story. Her fingers evoke January from the harp, and the discovery of the Dancer. It is all fragmentary, only motifs and themes. It is not yet a song. She limns the forlorn wastes of the unnamed world, the mystery of a city under the sand, the curious beauty of the Chamber and its unmovable Contents—earth, water, fire, and air. The relentless approach of the Irresistible. And the figures end in a dance of danger and escape—wild reel and stately quadrille, whirling waltz and graceful ballet. That much is true, at least. Waltzes and reels are dangerous, and she suspects there is dancing yet to come.

“And so, they cannibalized part of the ship anyway,” she says over the fading chords. “It’s what they should have done in the first place.”

“Yes,” the scarred man answers. “That’s something to keep in mind. And you’ve made the same mistake that January made.”

“What mistake is that?”

But the man shakes his head. “That’s for the ending, and it’s a poor end that has but one beginning.”