Emma Bull - Bone Dance

They were in High Savage, by which I decided they were from the greenkraals at the City’s edge. The tide was going out on Savage; in the towers, Rags was the waxing mode. The nearest nightbaby swayed out in front of me as I came closer. She had a mud-painted face, multicolored mud hair, and an epoxy bone in her nose—or a real one, maybe, but that was considered gauche in some circles.

“Ooo, loook! It’s a preeecious bit of street-meat! Let’s take it hooome and waaash it, and see what it iiis.”

That provoked a unison giggle from the group. I’d probably sold things to their parents. “Cinder in your eye,” I said, held up my palm, and blew across it at her face. She dodged, and I laughed.

She gave me a quick, narrow-eyed look—wondering if she’d been had? She couldn’t have been sure. The blood of the Horsemen had trickled over the continent—still did, though the Horsemen were dead. And where that blood was, where those genes came to rest, a skill might sprout: Sherrea’s mind reading; the placing of a nonexistent cinder in someone’s eye. But I had no inheritance from the wicked riders of the mind.

The mud furrowed and cracked around her eyes as she stared at me. Light reflected into her face for a moment, and I saw that those eyes were a peculiar flat, hard gray. She seemed older than I’d first thought, bones planed with years. “Use it while you can, honey,” she murmured, so angry she forgot to drool over her vowels. I felt her watching me as I walked away.

I passed Banana Sam’s Beer Garden on my way up-Fair, and heard a familiar half whistle, half call, high-low-high. And Cassidy’s voice: “Little bird! Keeper of the fire! Come drink with meeeeee!”

He was already low in his chair, flushed and untidy. His wide eyes sank into their bruised-looking sockets like clams dug into the sand, and the bones below them lurched up against the skin as if to counterbalance. Frail strands of bleached gold hair had slid out of his queue and fallen around his face and ears. The pitcher in front of him had maybe an inch and a half left in it.

Resigned, I came to his table. “What’s this ‘little bird’ riff, Cass?”

“The sparrow,” he said, smug, dignified, and clownish. “Guarded fire for the Devil, ‘til Swallow ripped it off and gave it to the walking dung beetles who started callin’ ‘mselves Mankind.”

Cassidy always talked like a Taoist mystic with a lobotomy when he was drunk. “I take it tonight we’re on the Devil’s side?” I asked as I sat down. I poured the last of the beer into his glass, and drank off half.

“Hey!”

“You don’t need it. Besides, you invited me.”

“For company. You can damn well buy your own suds.” He peered at me, as if through fog. “I don’t owe you any, do I?”

I considered my answer carefully. But lying, after all, would have been a sin. “No,” I said.

Cassidy looked long at the empty pitcher. “Well, hell. Make it a present, then.”

I set the glass and its last swallow of beer on the table. What was left in my mouth tasted suddenly like soap. I leaned back in the uncomfortable wire chair, away from the table, from Cassidy’s gesture, from him. I felt the need to wound. “I thought you were going to stop drinking at Midsummer.” The picador rises dancing to his toes— thump.

The unfocused camaraderie vanished from his face and voice. “ ‘S not Midsummer anymore.” His sunken eyes were bright with resentment.

“Just curious. I don’t care if you drink.” Thump –a second pointed sentence between the shoulders of Cassidy’s amour propre. No doubt the picador also thinks of it as self-defense.

Cassidy frowned down at his knotty fingers. There was a freshly scabbed cut on the back of his left hand, and I wondered, with a jolt of disgust, if he remembered how he’d come by it. In a few seconds that thought came back in my face. Well.

“How’ve you been?” I said, in lieu of apology.

He shrugged. “I’ve been like me, I guess. Like last night, only sweatier.”

“Did I see you last night?” I asked after a moment. My spine felt as if someone was about to hit me there.

“Course you did,” he said, looking hurt. “I bought you a drink.”

“That was nice of you. Where were we?”

“The Merciful Trap. Don’t you remember?”

“Let’s pretend I don’t.”

He’d had too much beer to notice the way I said it. “And you think I have a drinking problem. Yeah, you were burnin’ it last night. Dancing, buying rounds. You asked the band for a bunch of songs I never heard of.” He smiled at me. “They threw you out when they poured one round more than you could swap for.”

He hadn’t had too much beer. He must have watched my face shut up during that recitation, and known that it was an even trade for my unkindness. “Ah. I’m surprised you’ll be seen with me after that.”

“I’m savin’ your reputation,” he said. “Hey—will you introduce me to the redhead? The one with the shoes?”

“What redhead?” I asked, frightened.

“Oh, hell. You really don’t remember? Or are you just being a shit? When they tossed you at The Mercy, she went with you. And the guy dressed in gray, too, with the silvertones. They were worried about you.”

I wished I’d had the sense to be worried about me. But I couldn’t have. I hadn’t really been there. “What was I drinking?”

“Beer.”

“Was I taking anything else?”

“How should I know? You weren’t even drunk when they threw you out. Just kind of warmed up. You were maybe a little crazy, but not like you were dosed.”

“Such fine distinctions. If I wasn’t drunk, why don’t I remember anything?”

That startled him. “I don’t know. Hey, are you just saying you don’t remember so you don’t have to introduce me to the redhead?”

I smiled. “Me? The one who guarded fire for the Devil? Would I do a thing like that?”

“Like what?” said Dana from behind me, in her whiskey-liqueur voice. Of course; what was Leander without Hero? Cassidy was drunk, so it followed that Dana must be within striking distance.

She trailed a hand across my shoulders as she came around the table, sat in the chair between us, and laid her palm over Cassidy’s long, sharp-boned fingers. Dana couldn’t talk to anyone without touching. For someone like me, an acquaintance with Dana was a torture akin to water dripping slowly on one’s forehead.

“Cassidy thinks he’s found a chink in my obliging nature.”

“Shut up, Sparrow,” Cassidy said. Oh, Cassidy. I could have told her it was three redheads, and Dana wouldn’t have cared.

I’d have said Dana took her style from Bette Davis movies, if I thought she’d had access to them. Maybe she practiced in front of a mirror. Those Dana had access to. Her suit was metallic brown, fitted close to her tiny waist and just-ripe hips. Her silvery-blond hair fell forward over one shoulder, the end knotted off halfway down her breast with a black velvet ribbon. Her skin was smooth and faintly, rosily tan, all over her face and throat and disappearing between the lapels of her jacket. She had a supernatural artifice about her that made one want to pour water over her head just to test the strength of the illusion.

It occurred to me suddenly that it was a remarkably expensive illusion. The fabric and tailoring of the suit suggested the money that the nightbabies, in their mud and rags, pretended not to have. What was it that Dana did, when she wasn’t disturbing Cassidy?

“So, did you see me out carousing last night?” I asked her.

“No. Were you?”

“Cassidy says so.”

“Then it must be true.” She riffled a fingertip over Cassidy’s jutting knuckles, as if they were piano keys. Cassidy looked overwrought and a little ill. Alcohol and unrequited love will do that. Dana’s attention remained on me, the intensity turned up full. She’d caught a whiff of the bizarre; her nose never failed her. “Did you have a bang time? You don’t usually get radded up, do you?”