Wild Magic

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Faan lay in bed, listening to the quiet footsteps coming up the stairs. If Reyna had noticed her, he’d be in to talk soon as he’d washed up. She needed to tell him about Fedunzi, to get him to explain why… why… she needed to know if he’d ever… he hadn’t, he COULDN’T have…

She lay a long time shivering and miserable. He didn’t come and didn’t come.

Then the door opened.

“It’s way after midnight. Where were you? What were you doing out this late?” It was like he was beating her with the words,

She rolled onto her side, turning her back to him, pulled the quilts higher, and lay stiffly still.

His voice softened, but it was too late, his first words had wiped away everything but anger, fury, and hurt. “Faan, I’m not scolding you, I’m worried about you. The Edge is no place… ahhh, honey, so many things could happen to you, bad things I wish you didn’t understand, though I’m afraid you do. Children do…”

With angry angular movements, Faan bounced up, jerked the quilt around her shoulders and sat in the middle of the knotted sheets glaring at Reyna. “Understand! I understand a lot of things.”

Reyna snapped his head up and back as if she’d slapped him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Faan set her mouth in a stubborn line. “I wasn’t out whoring like you, if that’s what you think.”

Reyna drew his arm back; his hand closed into a fist, but he stopped himself before he touched her. He closed his eyes and stood shuddering. Faan could smell the anger on him and whipped up her own to match it. He drew in a long unsteady breath. “I don’t know what to do with you. I just don’t know.”

He swung around, went out.

Faan stared at the door a moment, then wrapped the quilts around her and tried to sleep, sliding in and out of nightmare for the rest of the night.

The drums beat like tinny hearts, ta ta ta tii-yi ta ta turn, the heavy throb at the end of each phrase dying into a wobbling ta a a. Ta ta, ta ti-i-yi, ta ta tum-mta as a.

The’daround hummed and buzzed, zou, zoul, za za za zing za.

A Kalele singer stood on a wooden drum behind the musicians, a slender coal-black man who looked much younger than he was, with a narrow naked torso and voluminous black wool trousers heavy with gold studs.

Ou sing zuul, n’ gid a meeeyn, ba bi mun, the singer keened in an asexual minor moan, ou zing zuul, gidda mii-yan, a modulated monotone. Nonsense words meaning nothing, it was safer to mean nothing, a wrong_. word was like plague, sickening then killing, but-blending with the hot smoky air, the smell of bodies in heat, the uncertain flick-flick of candle flames in sooty chimneys-the sounds created a fog of desire overlaid by melancholy.

Dawa danced with his long arms curled above his thrown-back head, sway-stamp-wheel, his sandals pat-

tering on a sanded section of floor within a circle of limelights in tin reflectors that threw their glow up from beneath, waking oiled blue glimmers on his skin, watery shimmers in the blue satin lining of his robe. He danced his ambiguity, his sexuality-and with his height, his physical beauty, with all his shadows running the wrong way-he was strange and intimidating though he did not mean to be.