Emma Bull - Bone Dance

“This may not be any chance at all.”

“You want to do it instead?”

He had me. And he knew it; I saw it in his eyes. “This is not The Magnificent Seven , Theo. This is real life.”

“Is it? You make it sound like A Fistful of Dollars . Go ahead. Tell me you’re gonna clean up the town single-handed.”

I had to drop my eyes from his. “I can’t. I don’t know how to be in two places at once.”

“So you need me to do the work in the Gilded West. Somebody’s got to, and I know how.”

Of course; it needed doing. Theo, who didn’t seem to have a religion, had always lived by the principles of this one.

“Just… ye gods, Theo, just stay away from Ego.”

“I’ll try,” he said. Then he clasped my hand quickly and headed off in the direction Sher had gone.

Which left Frances. “What shall I do, boss?”

“Help Theo find a turbine, I guess.”

“And then?”

“Come back here.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

I didn’t, either. “Why the hell do people have friends?” I burst out.

She didn’t misunderstand the sentiment. “As I’m sure Theo would say, it’s a bummer, man. But you can’t keep us from our future any more than we can keep you from yours. Place your troops.”

I sighed. “I’d feel better, actually, if you could stick to Theo. He’ll need help with the installation, and if he gets in any trouble—” I shrugged. “He’s not exactly John Wayne.”

“Luckily for you, neither am I; John Wayne was an actor. All right, I’ll be pit bull for Theo. Which means, I think, that this is good—pardon me, au revoir .”

“You won’t be back?”

“We’ll send word if we find the turbine. But if we do, I think we’d best go straight into town with it.”

She stood gravely in front of me for a moment; then, lightly, she put her arms around me and let go again. She looked to the sky and said fiercely, “ And how thou pleasest, God, dispose the day .”

Then she left.

It was Saint John’s Eve; it was my birthday; it was, whether I was prepared or not, whether I liked it or not, the day of my introduction to the master of my head, my mait-tete, my patron in the system.

I was lying blindfolded in a room, not my own. I hadn’t had anything to eat all day. I was wearing white. I knew that because I’d put it on myself, on Sherrea’s instructions. I knew about electronics. I knew nothing about the soul. I could only follow instructions.

Outside, the drums were playing, and had been for an hour.

I heard footsteps, several, and felt hands on my shoulders and under my knees. Whose hands? Oh, little gods, big gods, whose hands were they, that I was giving myself into? I could pull away, I could yank off the blindfold, I could say no. Sherrea hadn’t lied to me this morning: I could say no.

I jammed the syllable back down my throat until it was less than a whimper, only a tautness between my lungs and mouth. I was lifted up and carried outdoors, into the hot, windless air and the endless chirring of crickets. The drums wrapped around me like flannel.

My attendants set me on my bare feet suddenly, with a bang, and I staggered. I was on grass. I smelled candle wax and burning wood and people. I was held by my upper arms on both sides and drawn forward, and gripped and drawn forward again. I was being passed, I realized, down a double row of hands.

They weren’t strangers. None of the people who participated, who moved me from this point to the next one, would be strange to me. Josh would be here, whose hands had held my life and not dropped it, and given it back to me for free. Kris might have just passed me on, dirt under her stubby nails, teeth flashing in a firelit grin. LeRoy, who had picked me up broken and delivered me here, and Mags, who had fed and clothed me. These were the people who had lifted and carried me from the old condition of my mind to the current one. I could trust them to move me safely one more time.

Even under the blindfold, the light had grown strong. I heard the shook-canvas sound of the bonfire. A small pressure on my shoulders urged me to my knees, and finally full-length, facedown, on the grass. Above me, but not far, as if she might be kneeling, I heard Sherrea’s voice. It was the voice of a kick-ass bruja. My friend Sherrea looked like a waif, and sounded like a governess turned gun moll. She cried when I hurt. She was gone. This was a bruja.

“Close the circle. Legba Attibon, let it close and sit by the door. As we invite, let you admit. Legba of the stick, you are always welcome.”

On all sides of me, voices answered, in a language I didn’t recognize.

“Who knows this person?” Sher asked.

“I do,” said a strong and ragged chorus of voices. What person? Me?

“Keep what you know in your heads, then, good and bad. Hold it there, fix it in your eye, see it clearly from all sides. Because this person is bound for death, where the self is withered and washed away, where even names are cut like wheat and eaten. This person will cross the river that never runs, and on the other side, if you can’t give back the soul that you remember, this person will be truly dead, and go forever nameless in the dark.”

Hands again, that brought me to my feet. I was pouring sweat in the heat of the fire and the hot night, dazed and weak from hunger and from fear. The hands pushed, and I stepped forward into ice water. I was off balance; the other foot joined the first, and I fell to hands and knees into cold so intense it simply stopped my nerves. If I had known what I ought to do next, I’d forgotten it.

Then warmth on each arm—hands?—pulled me forward. My fingers closed in grass; I dragged myself, my feet useless as unshaped granite, and fell, facedown once more, on the ground.

Sound broke out like full-scale war. Yelling, drums, all the noises that can be made with the fingers and palms. It felt so good to be warm. It felt wonderful to be lying limp as wet newsprint, unable to rise, and to know that the condition was temporary.

In fact, I had to sit up almost at once, my legs under me, my head erect. The hands insisted. The hands cosseted and combed and smoothed, and where they passed, I was dry and free of any lingering chill. My skin seemed to have been remade and reinstalled. My heart gave a single, shattering bang and began to beat strong and evenly, and I wondered if it had been stopped and I hadn’t known. At last, the fingers traveling over my hair and face drew the blindfold away.

My eyes burned and watered with the light. The bonfire was behind me; before me was the great central tree of the town circle, surrounded in ramparts of candles. There were candles, too, in the hands of the people who formed the circle that enclosed me. There were enough people that it might have been everyone in town. No one stood close enough to me to have removed the blindfold that lay abandoned on my knees. Nowhere in the circle was there a body of water large enough that I could have stepped or fallen in it.

“You are born into the light,” said Sherrea, and I saw her at last. White cloth ran unbelted from her shoulders to her ankles and left her arms bare. Her hair was uncovered and massed like a thundercloud around her head, around her stern face. The stern waif’s face, with an indented place at the corner of the mouth as if a smile was stored there, with a lift of the eyebrows that said in her voice, clear as words, “Is this wild, or what? Isn’t this hot?”

“You who kept the soul and spirit plain, come and set it in its place again,” she said to the circle at large.

There was a big black ceramic pot at her feet. One by one, people came from out of the circle to put things in it. It was a singular, startling procession.