Bone Dance

The tea was mint, the sandwiches were cucumber and basil, the muffins were carrot, and the specks in the cookies were caraway. Then, I didn’t think that was significant. Tasty, but not significant. Now I wonder: How much of what I ate at that meal came from the garden that held that house like a cupped hand?

“You are safe here,” China Black said, “as long as you are our guests.” She was stern and distant, the patron of some church that put mercy after judgment. Her voice was roughened a little, as if from hard use. “It seemed to me we must have safety before we could speak freely. But now I would like to know why you are here.” And she looked at Frances and Mick.

Since her attention was elsewhere, I studied her over the edge of my cup. She wore a long, sleeveless olive-green dress, and a headwrap of green and yellow. Her nose, in profile, was high-bridged, and the nearest eyebrow shone like a streak of sweat. Her eyes were almond-shaped and sleepy-looking. I didn’t think she was sleepy.

“I’d like to know why you ask,” said Frances, smiling blandly.

Trust Frances to put all this amicability to flight. She watched us over her teacup like a panther eyeing a herd of antelope.

China Black was unruffled. “Would you like my credentials?”

“It’s a start,” Frances said.

Our hostess — was she our hostess? — seemed almost pleased. “This is a city divided in power. There is A. A. Albrecht, who sits at what he thinks is the heart, and tries to keep the flow of power all one way, all toward himself. He does not know, or care, perhaps, that the City is an organism, and that without its circulation, it will die. I am a houngan; I was chosen by the snake thirty years ago to serve the spirits, and the living. I and those like me try to keep the City’s lifeblood flowing in spite of Albrecht.”

“I thought if you were a woman, you were a mambo, not a houngan.”

“Once, if you were a woman, you could not be a houngan. And once, if you were a woman, you couldn’t be a soldier.” The look she gave Frances was probably meant to be quelling.

“Power is most things to most people,” said Frances. “When you talk about power in the City, do you mean money? Politics?”

“I mean energy,” China Black replied.

Frances’s expression made me think again of predators. “The ju-ju kind?” she asked with a hint of distaste.

“Not usually. Like you, he has little interest in the spirit.” China Black’s teeth flashed, just for a moment. “He wants to control electricity and fuel. If your vehicle was powered by methane, he would have it confiscated, because in the City no one may use fuel he does not profit from, and he neither makes nor taxes methane.”

While China Black and Frances eyed each other, I stole a glance at Mick. He was leaning back, legs crossed at the knee, cradling his teacup. He didn’t look relaxed. He was waiting for something, and until it came, there was no way to tell what.

China Black put her teacup down and said to Frances, “What is your name?”

“Frances Redding.”

“And you are… ?”

Frances raised her eyebrows. “Female? A Scorpio?”

“You know what I’m asking.”

“Then I’ll bet you know the answer.”

“Then it can do no harm to tell it to me.”

Frances’s jaw worked a little, as if she might be biting the inside of her lip. “I’m a Horseman,” she said.

It might not have surprised anyone in the room; still, there was a moment of silence for the enormity of the fact.

“And so are you,” China Black said, turning suddenly on Mick.

He started, looked up with a jerk. “Yes, ma’am.”

“What brought you here?”

“Impulse,” said Mick, with a shrug. “Nothing particular.”

After a moment China Black turned to Frances. “And you?”

Frances leaned forward and laced her ta

“Ah. In the interest of the general welfare, I think I am entitled to ask who.”

“His name is Tom Worecski. He’s also a Horseman. He was the leader of the group that betrayed… that started the exchange of things that go bang.”

“That betrayed humanity?”

Frances shrugged. “It seemed, on reflection, a little melodramatic. And not quite true. I think the grudge belongs to the Western Hemisphere.”

“The world is not so large that half of it can afford to ignore what happens to the other half. I would let it stand at ‘humanity’ — but maybe I am an unforgiving old woman. And maybe you are, too.”

“Maybe. If, when I find Worecski, I decide he’s become a saint, I’ll see if I can forgive him.”

“You haven’t found him? Then why do you think he’s here?”

Frances rubbed the space between her eyebrows absently. “I’ve trailed him here. I followed the wreckage he left behind him over the years — he’s a great one for wreckage — and the little personal motifs. That’s all we had as identities, once we found that the relationship between body and soul was tenuous.

“And Tom would want a city. He’d want plenty to work with, to run roughshod over. He wouldn’t be out in the bush, or settled in some farm village.”

“What if you’re wrong, and he’s changed?”

“Then I won’t be able to find him, will I? He’ll be safe. But I don’t think he’s changed.”

China Black set her cup in front of the samovar and turned the spigot. A fresh wave of mint smell curled around the room. “And why do you trust me with all this?”

“Because I suspect it doesn’t matter. I think he knows I’m coming, and if he does, none of this is news. If he doesn’t, it still won’t matter. He won’t run; Tom always loved a fight.”

“You know him very well, then?”

Frances’s face was still. “We went to Killing People School together. It produces a wonderful camaraderie.”

“Why were you after me?” Mick asked suddenly of the opposite couch. “You followed me around that night, didn’t you?”

“Maybe we didn’t know we were following you,” China Black replied with a large and uncharacteristic grin. “Maybe we thought we were following your body.”

Mick opened his mouth; then the expression seemed to fall off his face. “Oh,” he said.

He settled back into the cushions again, as if he were satisfied. But I’d seen the line that had appeared between his brows for a moment, and the unhappy little twist of his lip. I wondered if anyone else had.

“You said we might be able to help each other,” Frances said. “Now you know what I want. What about you?”

China Black’s attention moved slowly from Mick to Frances. “I am not so sure, now. What do you know about the spirits, the loa?”

Frances visibly squashed her frustration. “I’ve heard of them.”

“They are not gods, though they’re like them; and they are not ghosts, though they’re like that, too. The European churches prayed to gods that rarely spoke, and then only to a few. The spirits speak all the time, and we don’t pray to them any more than you would pray to your grandmother. We live with them. They are part of our family.”

“’Our’?” Frances said.

“If you asked, you would find most people of the City — of the streets — know them. The loa, the saints, the spirits, the ancestors. There are many names, but you would find the principles similar, and the way they shape the world. The people in the towers don’t think about the spirits. They don’t know how the world is shaped. And so they give it a shape, and try to make everything fit it. They separate the right from the left, the man from the woman, the plant from the animal, the sun from the moon. They only want to count to two. Ah!” China Black snorted and shook her head. “I have been a teacher so long that I fall into it, so!”

She drained her teacup and stood, and began to walk slowly up and down the room. “You don’t believe. You are like the people in the towers; it is your past they live in, not seeing that it hurts us all. But these things don’t wait for you to believe in them. Chango, the young warrior with the sword, came among us while we danced. He said that from his quarter, the south, one of his own would come, limping. Oya Iansa, Lightning Woman, came and said that change would arrive from the west, but would not know its own nature. And Eshu drank white rum and smoked a black cigar, and laughed until the tears poured down, as he told us to duck when the marassa met, and joined the dossou-dossa, and the three of them, like a three-pointed throwing star, broke all the windows in the tall buildings in town. Tell me,” China Black said, turning back to the couches, “do you see anything of yourselves in that?”