Black Light (28 page)

Because, marvelous as the people were, what was most wonderful of all was that every one either rode or walked beside a reindeer. Not huge and terrifying stags like the one I had seen slain; nor were they the graceful, golden deer that leaped across the roads in Kamensic. These animals were like nothing I had ever seen before, save in the fairy-tale posters by Edmund Dulac that hung in Ali’s room—small, graceful, almost dainty creatures, their fur the soft gray of a kitten’s belly. Even their antlers seemed toylike, the tips sawn off and strung with gold filigree and brass bells, a child’s memory of Christmas Eve and restless movement upon a rooftop. Small as they were, they seemed to bear their slender riders with ease; all save the two animals which brought up the rear of the cavalcade. The first of these carried no rider, but only a large bundle wrapped in deerskin and bound with leather thongs.

But it was the last reindeer that was truly a creature from a dream. Snow-white, its fur dazzling in the eternal twilight. It alone bore antlers that had not had their prongs sawn and blunted, and it alone carried neither saddle nor any other ornament. A solitary figure walked alongside it, head bowed and hidden beneath a fur hood. A figure slight as the others but wearing garb that seemed at once more archaic than their own, and more hieratic— a long tunic of supple hide, and over this a long open-fronted jacket, white and unadorned save for bands of white fur at cuff and hem. At the neck hung a necklace formed of myriad loops of crimson beads, heavy and pliant as a woven scarf.

The figure walked in silence, its feet moving in step with the animal’s. The white reindeer drew closer to its fellows, cropping at the coarse moss beneath their hooves, but before it could join them its keeper raised a hand bearing a long thin wand and slapped it upon the flank. The white reindeer halted. The figure struck it again, and this time I could see that the wand was in fact an antler, all its points shorn save two which formed a
V
at the tip. At the wand’s touch the reindeer shook its head and snorted in protest. The figure cried out a word of command; the animal immediately fell silent and began to nose the moss at its feet.

“See how it listens to you,” a voice breathed beside me. I started—I had forgotten Ralph was there—but before I could question him the figure took a step away from the animal and stood directly beneath the birch tree. The wind tore at the milky folds of the tunic and made ripples in the hood’s thick fur. The figure stood for a moment, wand in one hand. Then it tugged the hood back, and turning to the white reindeer cried out again. Louder, so that the other people stopped milling about and stood docile as their little herd. The command meant nothing to me, of course; but this time I recognized the voice. I began to shake my head, mouthing the word
No
over and over again until Ralph had to cover my lips with his hand.

“Yes, Lit.” With his other hand he forced my head up so I could see. “Oh, yes, yes, yes…”

Where the furred hood had been was a brilliant corona of red hair, unbound and streaming in the wind like a pennon. It framed a face sun-coarsened and angular as the others’, but even in that remote place utterly unmistakable. The same tilted nose, the same black eyebrows belying that bright hair; the same pale, almost silvery gray eyes. I had stepped through a portal in Bolerium, to stand beneath an eternal arctic sunset and gaze upon myself.

“No!”

I yanked free from Ralph, shouting. As I did the red-haired girl jerked her head upright and stared at me, her expression mirroring my own.

“Stop it!” hissed Ralph. Before I could dart away he grabbed me again. “Can’t you tell?
She sees you
!”

I froze. Because indeed the girl continued to gaze at me, pale eyes narrowed, mouth pursed as though about to speak. The others remained apart from her, tending their herd and the two children, who were busy gathering twigs and brush for a fire. At the redhaired girl’s side the white reindeer nuzzled at the ground. After a minute she reached to lay one hand upon its flank. Her eyes never left mine.

The realization that she could see me was terrifying. I buried my face in Ralph’s jacket, but it was no use. Within moments I was peering out at her once more. He began to stroke my hair, murmuring wordlessly; and that suddenly made me think of something.

“It
can’t
be me. My hair isn’t real. Ali hennaed it for me this afternoon…”

Ralph shrugged. “Neither is hers—”

He held up his hand, thumb and forefingers still stained from the ochre he had toyed with earlier. “It’s what they do—”

“Who?
Who
does it? Who
is
she?”

“She is as you see her: a girl, your age. I do not know her name, but perhaps she does not have one; at least, not what we would recognize as a name. She is their go-between, their navigator. Their pathfinder. She travels between this world and the realm of the dead. Her people call her
samdanan,
She Who Dances. But if you were to study ethnology under Professor Warnick at the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine,
he
would tell you that
samdanan
is just another word for
shaman,
and that it shares its roots with the Sanskrit
sraman,
which is not dissimilar to the Mongolian
samoroj,
or the Manchurian
sam-dambi,
which means ‘to dance.’

“Yet if you were to visit the village of Moruzzo several hundred years ago, the farmers would call her
strega:
a witch; just as they named Polly Twomey here in Kamensic. But there is still another word for what she is, Lit—

“Malandante.”

As I listened the scene in front of me began to blur; not as though I were passing through another portal, but as though a pale scrim had descended from the twilit sky. But it did not hide the taiga, or the redhaired girl and her antlered familiar. Instead other, more shadowy figures began to move beside her. They were no more of that time or place than I was, and yet they were somehow
known
to me, as though I had dreamed of them long ago, or seen them in a film which until now I had forgotten. A girl in a white shift, her face streaked with soot. Another girl in a blue dress and bright earrings. A rangy longhaired figure in a veil which I at first thought was another girl, but whose face beneath coarse linen was that of a man, clumsily rouged and with blackened lips. They walked back and forth in front of the redhaired girl, insubstantial as smoke and completely oblivious of each other. When a few moments had passed, first one and then another began to execute a crude sort of dance. So awkward were they that it was several minutes before I realized they
were
dancing—hopping up and down on one foot and moving in gradually widening circles, away from the girl Ralph had named
samdanan,
dust rising where they stepped.

And this, too, was grotesquely familiar. It filled me with horror, even as I struggled to recall where I had seen such a thing before, this clumsy, almost monstrous display of—

What? Mockery? Revulsion? Their movements were too crude to seem part of any sacred ritual, and yet they were undeniably choreographed, and undeniably alike. Even if the dancers took no notice of each other, even if they somehow were taking part in this bizarre performance over a period of thousands of years: still
it was the same dance.
In the midst of it all the redhaired girl remained motionless, her hand still upon the reindeer’s flank, her eyes watching me across the centuries.

“She sees you as you see them,” said Ralph. “And as you see her—as patterns in the dance. It is the one thing she can recognize down through the ages, the one thing that is not bound by the taiga or by her own time—

“—just as it is the only thing that you perceive, Lit,” he ended softly.

“I don’t know what you mean.” The hopping steps of the ghostly figures was hypnotic; it was an effort for me to form the words. “I don’t know anything about dancing, or—or any of this…”

Ralph shook his head. “I didn’t say you knew anything about the dance, Lit. I said you could
see
it. Just as she does. Do she think she understands? Do you think she recognizes us, or knows any more of our world than we do of hers?”

“But—but we
do
,” I said weakly. “You said so, you said she was called—a magician or something, you said Professor Warnick taught you—”

“Professor Warnick knows nothing!” Ralph’s voice rang out, so keen with rage I shrank back and expected the dancers to do the same. But he might have been a moth fluttering in the night sky, for all the notice they paid him. “He and his masters give
names
to things, that’s all, and think themselves wise! As though naming a thing is knowing it!

“Do you know what they call them, Lit?
Malandanti.
It means
Those Who Do Ill
—yet it means nothing, because it is only a perversion of what the Benandanti call themselves! And they have ever been blind to those things which they did not create, those things they did not name—

“But what this means is that they are blind to the entire world. Because even though they would like to believe that their god created it, and that their god watches over it as though it were a naughty child—still the world escapes them. They have no more understanding of its true nature than you or I do of
theirs
—”

He pointed at the phantom dancers. Their steps had become synchronized, so that even though they moved without seeing each other, they now formed a single chain, heads bobbing and arms extended as they hopped in a widening circle beneath the solitary birch. Of the herders, only the redhaired girl appeared to see them. The weird twilight had grown deeper. It touched her with a soft purplish glow and made her hair spark like copper wire, and flowed between the dancers so that they seemed to be stepping in and out of a moving stream. Now it was those others and their antlered mounts who seemed insubstantial, bright streaks upon a moving backdrop. I shook my head, struggling with a sensation that was not so much drowsiness as a deadening languor. I felt as though I had been dropped in amber and was slowly turning to stone. When Ralph placed his hands upon my shoulders I did not move; nor when he stroked my collarbone, pushing back the jacket I had been wearing so that it dropped to the ground. I no longer felt the cold, or the wind; though I could see where it rippled the leaves of the birch tree, and stirred the rustling mat of undergrowth. I could feel nothing but Ralph Casson’s touch.

“Tulamaka.”

The word came to me as though breathed in my ear, but it was not Ralph’s voice. Beyond the circle of dancers the redhaired girl’s eyes locked with mine. If I had any doubt before that she could see me, at this moment I had none; nor that she recognized me.

“Balthazar would say that she called you ‘fire-spirit,’ whispered Ralph. “Or ‘guardian of the forest,’ or ‘beast-wife,’ or ‘mistress of animals,’ or ‘bacchante.’

“But what she actually said is none of those things. Her name for you is unknowable, because it is no one thing. That is what the Benandanti will never understand. There are gods upon gods down the eons, and goddesses as well; and other things which the Benandanti have no name for—and thus they have no knowledge of them.

“But these are what the Malandanti serve. The unknown: the unknowable. That is why they give themselves no name, and also why their gods have many names; whereas the Benandanti believe that their master has but one.”

I tried to shake my head, found I couldn’t move. With great effort I spoke. “But—what are the Benandanti?”

Ralph’s voice grew harsh. “It is what they call themselves—‘The Good Walkers,’ and also ‘Those Who Do Well.’ That is how they see themselves: as the protectors of this world, keeping it safe from what they perceive to be dangerous to its order, and their own. But those who set themselves against the Benandanti are not treated gently, Lit—do not ever fool yourself into believing that. Even those who have served them loyally for time out of mind, may one day find themselves cast out, and—”

He fell silent. His hands upon my neck relaxed, and as they did I discovered that I could move again—though slowly, painfully, as though I were recovering from some injury. I turned to see the dance continuing before us, the dusk unaltered except where a few brilliant stars now blazed within the sky. There were more dancers now, some of them dressed in clothes that seemed less archaic though still strange to my eyes—robes and loose trousers, ribbons of bright yellow like saris or sarongs, the bright motley of harlequins. Many of the dancers were naked, or nearly so, their garments torn; and as I watched I saw another figure join the endless chain—one of the herders I had first glimpsed upon the taiga. Before I had thought its panoply of beads and leather ribands belonged to a woman, her long hair braided with bright red tassels.

But now as the figure took its place within the circle I saw that it was a man dressed as a woman. His face had been carefully scraped of any hair and his lips reddened, the same coppery color as the girl’s unbound tresses. When he moved it was with an elaborate effeminacy, his hands drawing circles in the air as he stood on one leg, like a heron, and then began the same strange hopping dance as the others. I thought of what Ralph had just told me, that the Benandanti—whoever they were—could name these things but not comprehend them.

I believed him. The man-woman ducked in and out between the other dancers, his arms snaking through the air. He did not look ridiculous, but frightening: his eyes wide and staring, his mouth a red gash in a face powdered white with wood-ash. As he leaped his braid tossed wildly, and its crimson tassels crowned his head like feathers, or horns.

And suddenly I knew what he reminded me of—the cave painting I had seen in the Nursery five years before. The same blankly staring eyes; the same slashed mouth. But strangest of all was the way one leg was raised, a clumsy accessory to the dance—and that, too, reflected the image of a man in animal costume, his foot injured or grotesquely foreshortened.

“But I’ve seen him!” I cried, pointing.