Songs of the Dancing Gods

CHAPTER 2 ON DANCING YOUR HEART OUT

They made a most unlikely looking group as they slowly made their way down the road away from the mountains, toward green fields and rolling hills.

In the lead was a big man with bronze skin and tight muscles, the kind you would never doubt could carry the horse he rode as well or better than that same horse carried him. His skin, darkened and weathered by the elements, was, nonetheless, bronze to begin with; his finely chiseled face was barren of facial hair unlike the local customs, yet seemed as if it had never known a razor, and his thick black hair hung below his shoulders like a mane. His high cheekbones marked him as an Ostrider, a continent weeks from Husaquahr over dangerous seas, yet he had never been to that fabled continent. He wore only a strange, broad-brimmed hat, a loincloth, and swordbelt, and from the latter one could see the hilt of a massive and elegant sword. He looked at once exotic, strange, and dangerous.

The woman was fairly tall, with extremely long, muscular legs; fair of skin, although tanned by the sun, her hair lightened by exposure to the sun, she had delicate, sensual features and an athlete’s thin, firm build, without fat or loose areas. But a head shorter than the man, she had perhaps half his mass, perhaps less, and seemed almost tiny by comparison. Although she wore a thin, shielding cloak of light brown tied at the neck, otherwise she wore strings of woven beads that barely hung on her slender hips from which strings of more varicolored beads protected what little there was of her modesty. Another such assortment of beads strung together barely covered but hardly concealed her small, tight breasts. A faded, thin, golden headband, worn more for decoration than utility, sat upon her head, a slight bit of ornamental work extending below it in a triangular shape extending down almost to eye level. Matching bracelets and anklets completed her wardrobe, the bands holding tiny enclosed bells that sounded when she moved.

The third of the company was a young man, possibly not much past puberty, dressed much like the man. His skin was extremely dark, the deepest of browns without going to full black, like the Nubians of the Southern Continent, a trace of whose common features could also be seen in his face, yet his steely black hair was straight and long, like the big man’s. He was dressed in dark brown leather briefs and chest straps of the same, studded with ornamental bronze bolts, and matching leather boots.

“Man! This place is boooring!” the lad muttered, loud enough for the others to overhear. “I’m hot and sweaty and smellin’ like a stuck pig. This whole world smells like a horse’s ass! And this damn outfit’s rubbin’ my skin raw.”

“We’ve heard it all before,” the big man responded, not looking back. “As for the outfit, you’re the one who picked that out, remember, against our advice. Most of this world’s a lot warmer than back home.”

“Yeah, I know, I know, but it look baad!”

“ ‘Looks,’ ” the woman corrected him. “It looks bad. How many times do we have to drill that into you?”

“You ain’t my mother!” the boy shot back. “You got no place speakin’ to me like that.”

“No, your mother let you run wild on the damned streets,” the big man responded. “Now I am your father, and I didn’t. carry you away—you came yourself when I gave you the chance. Your real mother, for what she’s worth, is so far away from us that she, or you, might as well be dead. Tiana’s my wife and your stepmother, and I’ll have no more of that. Unless, maybe, you want to take me on and show me who’s really boss, like last time?”

The boy glared, but did not immediately respond. He was still getting to know his father and unsure that he ever really would, deep down, but he sure as hell knew that the big man was the meanest, toughest dude he’d ever run across. He’d quickly learned that much the hard way and didn’t want to push it. Being a full-blooded Apache trucker was bad enough, but a guy who’d spent the past several years in this world as everything from mercenary to adventurer to ruler of a kingdom and seemed none the worse for it wasn’t anybody you wanted to screw around with. He decided to switch familiar gripes.

“Yeah, but where’s all the fun in this hole? I thought there’d be dragons and monsters and all that Conan stuff. What we seen most of is proof that white folks can live even worse here than black folks in Philadelphia.”

“They’re here,” the big man assured his son. “You’re just not ready to take them on yet.”

“That’s what parents always say, ain’t it? You’re ready, and you say you got all them big connections, but we’re movin’ ’round here and livin’ like runaways and eatin’ worse.”

“I’ve had my three big quests,” the father responded. “I’m a little tired of nearly getting killed every ten minutes. I needed a break. You wait until we run into something nasty. Then remember your complaining.”

“Yeah, well, it—it’s got to be better than Ms. Man! What a place! No electricity, no runnin’ water, no flush toilets, no cars, no guns, no rap, no rock, no soul, not even no TV!”

“You want out? Back to the streets? Back to running drugs for some street gang until somebody didn’t like the way you looked at him and blew you away? No future but death at a real young age? You didn’t have a future, Irv—you didn’t even have a present. The way you whine and complain, somebody in that crowd you ran with would’ve knocked you off within a year or so, anyway. You know it, and I know it.”

The boy looked sullen. “So?”

“So cut the crap! In a couple of days, we’ll reach the river, and not long after that we’ll be at Castle Terindell. Still nothing supermodern, but comfortable. Lots of good food, featherbeds, and the like.”

“Yeah? Why we goin’ there, though? Just for laughs or what?”

“Uh-uh. Time you went to school, son.”

“School! You ain’t said nothin’ ’bout no school!”

“Not the kind you’re thinking of, although, God knows, you sure could use one. The same kind of school I once went to at Terindell. Survival school, you might call it. Learning how to survive to my age around here.”

The boy was suddenly interested. “You mean fightin’? Like swords and knives and shi—er, stuff like that? O-boy!”

“I mean stuff exactly like that. Don’t get your hopes too high, though, tough boy. We’re gonna see just how tough you really are. And if you wash out, you might have a real future as a stablehand shoveling horse shit for the rest of your life.”

“Hey! Wait just a damn second! You sayin’ if I flunk out of this hero school I’m a nothin’? I might just not like it.”

“Oh, I guarantee you won’t like it, at least at the start,” his father assured him. “But nobody flunks out. You keep at it until you get it and you pass—or you get killed trying or you quit and walk out. The only one that flunks you is you. If you can’t hack this, then you can’t hack it anywhere on your own in this world, and anybody—I mean anybody— who can’t handle himself out here on his own winds up practically owned by somebody else. You’ve seen that already. There are only three kinds of people here. The rulers, maybe five in a hundred folks; the ruled, which is ninety-four point nine of the rest, and that tiny one in thousands who’s an independent like me. You weren’t born royal and -you haven’t shown any talent for magic, so being independent or one of the ruled is all you can get. And of the ruled, if you can’t fight, can’t read or write the chicken scratches they use here, and have no skills, you shovel shit. Hell, son, somebody’s got to do it.”

“Not me!”

“Yeah? Well, you prove it. Because if you walk, that’s the best you can hope for and I won’t stick around to help you do it. Do that or you’re dead. Those are the choices if you walk. Remember that.”

Irv seemed to have lost a lot of his confidence all of a sudden, but he still maintained a brave front. “You got through it, didn’t you? If you can do it, I can do it!”

“Wagons coming, Joe,” Tiana cut in.

Joe pulled his horse up and looked at the oncoming traffic. It was less wagons than a wagon train, coming single file, pulled by massed teams of horses.

“Man!” Irv swore. “Whatever they’re carryin’, it’s heavy as gold and big as a subway!”

The boy wasn’t far off the mark in his comments on the load. When they got right up to the lead wagon, they could see the eight-horse team straining, the driver and brakeman working constantly to keep them straight, balanced, and in line.

“Hello!” Joe shouted to them. “What are you hauling?”

“Sorry! Can’t stop to chat!” the brakeman shouted back. He. gestured at the load in back of him. “Rules change sheets! If we stop, there’ll be two more revisions of these right in back of us!”

Irv looked at the wagons. Five… six… seven of them. Each the size of a locomotive, or so it seemed. He knew what the Rules were—the crazy books of laws that governed everything and everybody in this nutty place. But— “What’re Rules change sheets?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.

“You know the history,” Tiana replied as they made way and watched the huge train go by. “In the Creation, Husaquahr was created in a kind of backwash, with the leftover energy from the creation of your world. The Creator Himself took charge of Earth, but He delegated Husaquahr to the lesser angels who weren’t as thorough or competent. They mated with the ones here and produced the first in the line of sorcerers, people of great power who were half human, half angel.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know all that. You told me. But—change sheets!”

“In the beginning,” Tiana explained, “the incomplete universe which contained Husaquahr was basically chaotic. Even the basics, like gravity, only worked some of the time. The Founding Angels rushed in to do what they could, establish a basic set of Angelic Laws to supplement natural laws where they were weak, creating stability out of the chaos. Being lesser, they still took a number of short cuts, creating much imitation of Earth but often not quite like Earth. Given a core number of souls by the Creator, early experiments produced strange results, in which the soul itself took on physical reality and mated with those things of animal and plant which imitated forms from Earth. The offspring of those created the thousands of races of faerie.* Essentially immune to age, they were made very slow to breed, and set to supplementing the angels in their establishing tasks, from climatological management, like the legendary Frost Giants, to the mineral management of the dwarves, the flower-tending of the pixies, and the husbandry of the nymphs and satyrs. The basics were maintained by the least of the souls, the elementals.

*Faerie refers to the heritage, magic nature, power, and “realm” of fairies in general; it has a connotation of that which is withdrawn from human ken. Fairy refers in more specific-manner to individuals, races, traits, and abilities of the fairy folk; its connotation is more that of a normal, day-today existence.

“After the Great Upheaval on Earth, some of the fallen humans were given to the angels of Husaquahr to establish their dominion here and duplicate the basic system. But since they were already stained by sin, these humans had a hard time from the start and even less wisdom. To compensate, the angels mated with men and produced a hybrid race. Half retained more of the angelic powers and began the line of sorcery; the other half gained higher wisdom, and became the founders of the royal lines. The sorcerers then became the finishers of the work, as the angelic powers had to withdraw, and, from experience living in this new world and from their own humanity, wrote the Books of Rules to bind and control and shape the subsequent history of Husaquahr for both faerie and human.

“That, of course, was close to the dawn of human time. After a while—who knew how long—these first founders felt their job done and went on to some higher, perhaps angelic plane, themselves; their children now became the sorcerers. But, although sorcerers tended to live impossibly long lives, as each generation of them grew and the elders eventually tired and went on to wherever sorcerers went on to, the angelic blood was diluted more and more with humans. The powers of five generations before were only shadows of what their ancestors could do; those today mere shadows of that generation. And yet, each generation, generation after generation, kept on finding loopholes or specifics not addressed in the Rules and, as such, amended them. They couldn’t really change what their more powerful predecessors had decreed, but they could keep adding, keep ‘plugging in the holes’ as time passed. And the less power and the less wisdom that they had, the more holes they found and the more new Rules they wrote.

“By now, the sorcerous bureaucracy was incredibly well organized; it only remained for that huge assembly to get out the amendations and hair-splitting new Rules to all those magical folk and royal, temporal powers throughout the world so that they would know what was being done.”

“There’s probably a Rule in this batch regulating the length of nose hairs,” Joe muttered.

“Oh, no,” Tiana responded sourly. “They would have addressed something that major generations ago.”

Irv looked at the last wagon to pass and imagined the mountain of paper contained within. “Is there anybody who knows even half of what’s in them papers?” he asked.

“Probably not, not even among those that create them,” Tiana responded honestly. “It doesn’t make any difference. Once the Rules are properly distributed, they go into force and we’re stuck with them. They’re not like laws, you know. Those are made by governments, which we also have plenty of. Everyone, even nonhumans, will be bound by whatever is in there as if it is natural law, like breathing or what goes up usually comes down.”

“And you ain’t worried? I mean, that somethin’ buried in one of them wagons won’t suddenly change the way we look or talk or think or act?”

“I was born here,” she reminded him, “I sort of take it for granted.”

“You just learn to forget that it’s going on,” Joe told him. ” You can’t do anything about it anyway, and by this time everything really nasty that they could do has either been done or been stepped on by some prior rule so it’s canceled out anyway. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

The boy frowned. “But if all them papers don’t make no difference, then why do it at all?”

“Oh, they might make some minor differences,” Tiana told him. “Still, you are right—it’s mostly harmless at this point. But, you see, constantly revising and perfecting the Rules takes a huge bureaucracy, larger than the kind that runs most governments. Thousands upon thousands of people and fairies, all employed in everything from proposing the additions to arguing for them or against them, helping adopt and implement them, printing and delivering them—it’s a massive undertaking.”

“And yet all them people do all that work and nothin’ much happens because of it?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“Then why do they do it? Seems like a total waste of time.”

“Oh, their positions are essential,” she responded matter-of-factly. “If they didn’t do what they did, then all those masses would be unemployed, and, being bureaucrats, most of them couldn’t do anything useful. Why, they wouldn’t survive!”

“Or, worse, they might get together and try to do something really useful,” Joe added. “That would be a disaster. So, don’t worry much about it, and particularly not yet. You’re still not quite within the Rules. So long as you aren’t physically changed here by some magic, you’re still outside the more specific rules. Unless you’re a changeling, which I seriously doubt, since we’d have noticed by this time, you’ll just slowly come under more and more the longer you’re here, without even noticing it.”

“Changeling. Yeah, Like that sexy broad with the wings we melon the boat.”

“Uh-huh. Marge. She came over with me and at the time was as human as Tiana or me. She changed into one of the fairy races after she was here. It happens. But I doubt if you qualify.

I seriously doubt if your mother had that trigger in her genes, and I sure don’t. And, judging by the time she took to change, I think you’d have done it by now if you were going to, anyway.”

“What do’ya mean by trigger in my jeans? I ain’t got no jeans on.”

“In your blood,” Joe told him. “If you’d ever gone to church back home, you’d know that it wasn’t just here that angels mated with people. That was so long ago, though, back before Moses’ time, that it’s even more diluted back there than here. But some folks have a little of that blood, either from the angels or from demons, too, or early fairy-human matings, passed down in them. If you do, you become a changeling when you get here.”

“Jeaz… I think that’d be kind a neat,” the boy said. “Maybe growin’ wings and gettin’ magic powers and all that. Uh—did you say demons?”

Joe nodded. “There’s some pretty mean fairies, too. Pray you don’t meet them, believe me!”

“But being one of the fairy folk isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Tiana pointed out, glad mat the boy was at least interested in something. “Our souls are eternal; they do not die with our body. In the fairies, the soul is made flesh and is the body. They never really grow old, although experience gives them that look after a long time, but as they are flesh, they are mortal. Iron, for example, is deadly to most of them, except gnomes and a few other special races, and they are also subject to some forms of accidents and even murder. If they die, they’re dead. To kill a fairy is to kill its soul as well. They don’t even have the option of dying. Their only chance is to remain alive and well until Judgment.”

“Un-huh,” Joe put in. “And they’re sort of one-dimensional. Stuck. Remember, son, the fairies were shaped to do particular kinds of things and nothing else. They can’t change, can’t learn or do other things, outside what they were basically designed to do. They can’t quit and try something else. It’s got to become either boring or frustrating after a while, maybe after a few hundred years, no matter what you’re doing, particularly if you’re smart and curious and ambitious. They can no more change than a horse can decide one day it would rather be a cat.”

Tiana nodded in agreement with him. “Yes, sometimes I feel rather sorry for Marge. Even more, now that I have a similar if more mortal situation. Her changeling race was dictated by her own soul at the time and was what she needed to be at that time, but, now… I’m not so sure. She’s intelligent, educated, adventurous, and could have been someone really important.”

Joe looked over at Tiana. “Do you feel frustrated?”

“No, not really. I admit that some days I’m still not used to being this small and light, but when have you ever heard of a woman complaining of that!” Tiana’s original body had been as large as he was, and as massive. Thanks to the body and soul snatching techniques of the Master of the Dead, her soul had wound up first in the body of a mermaid, then this dancer’s.

“Yeah, but what about bein’ somebody real important?” Irv asked her.

She shrugged. “I was somebody important. A queen, in fact. And, by sorcery, your dad at the time looked like some northern barbarian instead of his old self.”

“And your body got stole?”

“Well, in the end, I could have had it back,” she admitted. “But, then, you see, I’d have to have come back to being Queen. And if your dad had gone back to the way he was most of the time here, he’d have been King.”

“Hey! What’s wrong with that? All the best, no work, and— wait a minute! That’d make me a prince!”

“It’s luxury, all right,” Joe agreed, “but it’s also a trap, a prison, and, believe me, if you think this is boring, you haven’t been a monarch. Your job is to cut ribbons and preside over boring meetings and stay apart from the common folks. That was the worst. Not even being able to walk down the street in my own city, go into a good pub and have a beer, talk to who I wanted, do what I felt like.”

“Yeah, maybe I’d hate it, but I didn’t even get the chance to try it. I mean—like, I thought kings and queens could do pretty much what they felt like.”

“Less than the stableboy,” Tiana told him. “You can’t change the system and you are what you are and you have to play the part. We couldn’t even sneak out for a night. The society detided we were demigods, half human, half divine. They erected thousands and thousands of huge statues of us in the nude in practically every public place. Everybody knew us—in the most intimate detail you can imagine. You’ve seen some in the towns we passed.”

The boy was thunderstruck. “Those two was you two?” He laughed.

“Uh-huh. And that’s why we decided to stick to the way we are now,” Tiana told him. “It wasn’t a radical change for your dad. He’s still big and handsome, just in a different way.”

“I’m in much better condition than Ruddygore found me,” Joe noted. “But, yeah, I’m still classed as your typical barbarian hero. That’s why he picked me off that road seconds before I would have died in a crash. Tiana, though, was born here to a royal family. I think she’s even prettier and sexier now than she was before, but it’s a very different life for her. From royalty to commoner, and inheriting the baggage the Rules placed on the new body before she had it.”

“I don’t mind if you don’t,” she told him sincerely. “In fact, because I was Ruddygore’s ward and educated on Earth, I had some feeling for what it was like among the common people. I haven’t missed it nearly as much as I thought I might. The only frustration I really have sometimes is that I used to be strong as an ox. Now I couldn’t lift my own shadow. I’m not used to having to depend on others to protect me, even in so simple a thing as walking down a street. Strange places, dark places, strange crowds all seem somehow threatening now. I guess most women grow up with that, but I didn’t, and I’m still learning how to cope with it. I’m still learning to be tough again, in a different way. That’s also been part of this trip. Not just for you to learn, but me as well.”

At the City-States, where they’d docked after crossing the Sea of Dreams, Joe had decided Irving needed experience. So he’d taken a long vacation while he, Tiana, and the boy rode up through Leander and High Pothique on horseback. During that time, Irving had turned thirteen. And now they were nearing the end of the journey.

The boy seemed puzzled. “I don’t get it. You say the fairy folk got problems ’cause they’re locked in to doin’ one thing while we’re not, then you say you’re just as locked in by them Rules as they is—are.”

“He’s got you there,” Joe said, somewhat approvingly of his boy’s debating logic.

The argument disturbed her… “No, we have more potential before we’re locked in. We don’t have to turn out the way we do. We set out upon a path and only when that path is certain do the Rules specifically kick in for us.”

“Yeah, like Dad had a choice of whether or not to be a fighter, maybe? Or did you set out all along to be a dancer?”

She sighed. “No, but I had a choice of dancer or queen, at least. And your father’s personality, his mind and body, likes and dislikes, modes and inclinations, made him a mercenary when he came here. With an education, with skills, you can become all sorts of things.”

“Uh-huh. Like the law says ’cause I was born in America I could be president, but the real life said I was born poor and black with a choice of choosin’ up gangs or bein’ carved up by both of ’em. Uh-huh.”

Joe took pity on Tiana and decided to rescue her. “You just said it, Irv. Not too many people get choices no matter where they are. But some do—they’re smart enough or maybe they just luck out. It’s hard to say for sure. It’s lots of things we can’t control, from race to brains to breaks. But even folks who have all the right things sometimes wind up in the mud, and sometimes folks who have nothing really do wind up with it all. Not many, but some. Right now you’re coming up on that point. You can be a fighter if you have the guts—I know you got the makings in you, since you’re half Apache—or you can chicken out and become a laborer. That’s more choice than you were heading to back home. But when you’re locked in here, you’re locked in. The system depends on that, on nobody rocking too much of the boat, so they made sure nobody could rock it but so much.”

“Sounds just like back home,” the boy responded.

A little before midday the next morning, they went up high on a bluff and looked down on the river.

It was incredibly wide, perhaps more than a mile wide at this point, and swift-flowing; within its broad expanse you could see currents and small whirlpools and eddies. It was the aorta of Husaquahr, the source of its power and wealth and riches and of life itself. Virtually every drop of rain that fell for a thousand miles in any direction wound up in it; all other rivers and streams were its servants, its arteries. The people, both human and fairy, of this land thought of it less as a thing of nature than as something nearly divine; it was their mother, their companion, the one factor that linked them all together, no matter what their race or job, no matter their nationality or culture.

Even Irv was impressed. “Man! That’s some big wet sucker!”

Joe chuckled. “Can you swim?”

“In that! You got to be kiddin’!”

“Don’t worry—you won’t have to. Not that we could, anyway. That current is strong enough to sweep you miles downriver before flinging you against the next bend, and it’s plenty-deep.”

“What they got then? A bridge? ”

“Nobody here could possibly build a bridge that would stand up to it,” Joe replied. “Maybe way, way upstream, where it’s a lot narrower, they could, but they wouldn’t.”

“Huh? Why not?”

“It’s kind of—well, against their religion, you might say. Oh, they’ll bridge most any other river or creek and dam up the others and do all the usual things, but not the River of Dancing Gods.”

“So how do you cross it, then? I see some small boats out there but I don’t think none of ’em could make it regular here to there without no engine.”

“You’re probably right,” Tiana agreed, “but the river bends and twists like a snake for all its length. Where it bends, it slows and deposits its loads as well, which often narrow it. Just above those narrows it seems almost still, and at those points boats can cross without much problem. We’ll have to go up till we find such a point.”

“Yeah? And they take you across for nothin’?”

Joe looked at Tiana. “He’s got a point there. We’re back in civilization now—these are all farms and preserves and freeholds. No living off the land here. And we don’t want to blow half a year if I land a commission.”

She shrugged. “We both know the area here. We could reach Samachgast by nightfall. It is the kind of river port suited to my talents.”

“The kind of place where you can get yourself killed or worse,” Joe responded worriedly.

“Do you think I like it? Remember where I came from and how far I have come down. But, as the boy said, it is the Rules. In spite of it all, I am nearly driven to do it. Besides, I have my two protectors with me, do I not?”

She turned and kicked her horse to action, and they followed, going up the river road toward the distant town.

They were the typical rabble who worked ports and the sea; not nearly as rough or mean as ocean men, but a rough enough looking bunch to give anybody pause. Now, as they gathered around the torchlit posts and watched her dance, they gave the usual lewd and salty comments and obscene suggestions as she whirled.

Irving had early displayed a real talent for the drums; the ones they carried weren’t exactly first rate of their kind and were less than great as instruments in any event, being somewhat limited in range, but he got everything out of them that they were capable of.

The only thing Joe ever remembered being able to play well was a stereo system, and those were pretty far away right now, the only remnant the Peterbilt logo on his incongruous but ever-present trucker’s cowboy hat. He just stood well back, almost in the shadows, as always, having more than a few mixed feelings about all this, and nervously watching the men in the crowd.

Tiana was not merely any old dancer; her body was essentially built and honed to that one function above all others, and she could twist and turn in ways that would put most people into hospitals or homes or at least traction. Any part of her seemed capable of bending in any direction independent of the rest and, without thinking, any part of her could be rubber or steel as called for. It seemed as if there was little in the way of acrobatics she could not perform with those legs, and, as a performer, she was spellbinding, even hypnotic. It was all done essentially without thinking; when there was a rhythm she could dance to, some kind of switch just got thrown in her brain and from that point it was totally automatic, the routine always skilled but improvised, the pace increasingly frantic, timing and balance absolutely perfect.

If that had been all, Joe still wouldn’t have minded as much, but she wasn’t merely a great acrobatic dancer, either. She was almost pure animal, catlike, savage, magnetic. She was an erotic dancer.

One of the Books of Rules had something like two chapters strictly on erotic dancing, and that didn’t count the inevitable supplements and addenda they’d never seen or gotten to. Naturally, as soon as they’d hit a town, they sought out the library and looked it up. Trouble was, that was the first inkling of problems. He’d never learn to read that crap—they had a pictographic writing, like Chinese, only with even more symbols—and Tiana, who always could, had discovered now that she could not. A friendly librarian, used to the problem, read it for them.

Dancers danced. Period. The Rules removed or prohibited all things that might interfere with that function. Dancers did not need reading, writing, or the like, so that was simply eliminated as a possibility. Dancers could read and write music, however, if they desired to learn it. Yet they had quite an innate mathematical sense, something Tiana had heretofore lacked. It appeared that dancing involved a whole lot of instant, unthinking calculations.

Erotic dancers, in addition, turned people on. It did not necessarily mean lust for her, but that was certainly a factor and a possibility, even a probability in a crowd like this, already uninhibited, probably drunk, and out for a night on the town.

Irv had learned by now not to let her go on too long or it might cause riots. The idea was to give the crowd a real thrill so they’d toss money for more, then give them a little more, and so forth. She wouldn’t, maybe couldn’t, stop until he did, and he brought it to a close and ended quickly, leaving her with a perfect split.

There was a momentary silence, and then a lot of clapping and yelling and cries of “More! More!” They, however, knew the traditions, and coins started being showered from the crowd all around her. Irving, with long street experience in his still short years, wasted no time in gathering them up so expertly they seemed almost to be vacuumed from the ground.

They weren’t quite that fired up yet; they wanted more and they’d paid for more. At this point, Joe was less worried than he was amazed, as always, that with all that leaping and whirling and twisting, Tiana wasn’t even breathing hard and had barely raised a sweat.

The second set was no mere repeat of the first, but a whole different routine, far more elaborate, erotic, and somewhat inflammatory. If she really was in control of herself when doing this, she could manage it better; but once she got started, all bets were off, and it had been some time since she’d danced for an appreciative crowd. The Rules didn’t just make you a dancer; you had to do it, all out, to the best of your ability, and hers was pretty damned good. The longer she went between shows, the more it built up inside her, like a tightly coiled spring, and when it was let out it was intense after this kind of layoff.

Hell, Joe didn’t think it was a big deal to turn on a bunch of drunken male river rats, but at this stage she could turn on almost anybody, and even the women with some of the men were showing real signs of bodily desire. He shifted his sword to the ready and moved into a better position.

Irv knew the dangers, and kept the second set short. This time the coins came faster and more furiously; this time they were demanding she go on and on. Between dances now, he could see Tiana’s face begin to pale as she sized up the crowd, many of whom were beginning to press closer to her, and she was already encircled. They had rehearsed a maneuver for this kind of situation, since it proved not that uncommon; a particular cue, a particular signal that Irv would make with the drums that would command this sort of finish. It depended, though, on her having the strength of will to break through that emotional trancelike dance state, to make the old Tiana control the new.

The one time they had tried it before, she’d managed it, but that spring inside her wasn’t totally uncoiled as yet, and it was no sure thing in this bigger crowd and rougher environment, either. He gave the signal to Irving, hoping the boy would catch it or have the sense of the crowd to do it anyway.

Irv did, but this third set was a humdinger; the crowd was joining in to the same rhythms, which were, after all, more street Philadelphia than Husaquahrian to begin with and thus had an extra impact, and Tiana was outdoing herself and leading them on. The situation was rife with the potential for, at best, a mass open-air orgy or, far worse, a violent and dangerous frenzy. Joe pulled his sword out of its sheath and held it so that the flat could be used, almost clublike. Tiana had already missed a couple of exit opportunities, and he feared the worst.

However, just when he thought he’d have to wade in and get her out, she did a tremendous series of twists and leaps and then, with the crowd giving almost awestruck room, she dashed for the crowd, then gave a mighty broad jump and actually cleared the heads of the nearest spectators, landing with a three-roll up to the edge of the buildings, then quickly running into the nearest doorway and out of sight of the crowd, which, momentarily stunned, now galvanized as a mob and stormed after her.

Joe stepped back, sheathed his sword, and let them charge the open doorway to the small bar into which she’d run, and, when the last were inside or milling just outside, made his way to Irv, who was already packed and ready.

“Pretty good haul,” the boy remarked. “Man! If I only had a guitar, maybe a sax, I could lay down a great rap and they’d never come down!”

“Come on,” Joe snapped. “We better make sure she made it out the back way. It sounds real mean in there right now.”

“Don’t it always?”

They made their way to the back of the buildings, which were virtually on the river itself, and Joe tried to get his eyes accustomed to the sudden darkness. “Watch your step,” he warned the boy. “This wood’s old and rotten here; one false step and you go right into the river.”

A dark shape moved from beneath the stairs in front of them. “It’s about time,” Tiana said nervously.

“We’re here as fast as we can move,” Joe responded. “Why? Trouble?”

“A couple of filthy types in that bar made grabs for me,” she told them. “I had to kick one of ’em in the balls and the other one in the face.”

“You’re learning fast,” the big man said approvingly. She might not manage a sword, but legs powerful enough to make the kind of leap she’d made, combined with her timing, were lethal weapons in and of themselves. “You delayed a long time, though. I was afraid you weren’t going to make your break.”

“Too many people. Too many tall people. I had to wait until there was a thin spot with shorter men. Even then I kind of back-kicked one as I went. I’m still not used to looking up at most men. Still, I have to admit I haven’t had this much fun in my life.”

She wasn’t being sarcastic with that last remark and he knew it. She was quickly developing a taste for living on the edge, for taking last-second chances and, he knew, she relished the power and attention and near mystical effect her dancing and athletic skills could have on people.

“Yeah, well, one of these days there’s gonna be too many tall guys to jump over and too many for me to fend oif, too,” he warned her. “If you survive that, it’ll take most of the fun out of it.”

She came up to him, put her arms around him, and kissed him. “God! I’m really turned on!” she whispered. She always was after one of these things.

At that moment a door crashed open, flooding the back area with light, and a big, bearded man shouted, “There she is!”

“Scatter!” Joe shouted. “The usual places!” He held out his hand. It was time to call upon the great magical sword named after his son. “Irving, to me!”

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Not you,” he growled, as the men streamed out with blood in their eyes. “I said for you to scatter! The sword, damn it!”

“Oh!”

Frustrated, he drew his great sword just barely in time as the first of the men came at him. Using mostly the flat, he banged heads and sent men sprawling. Some fell back and there was the crack of rotting wood and then yells and splashes.

A knife whizzed past his ear and he decided it was time to beat a retreat himself. He waited until they surged forward, then quickly backed up, causing the mob almost to Ml over each other. Satisfied, he turned, there was a cracking sound, and in a few more seconds he felt himself fall into the river.

It wasn’t terribly deep right in there, and he hit the mud bottom and kicked off, encumbered by his necessary grip on his sword. The river water here was static, due to the piers and construction, and smelled like raw sewage, which was what got dumped into it by the town anyway. Struggling, he made his way in under one of the piers to where his head and shoulders were above water when he stood and managed to sheath the sword.

As much as he wanted out of that river at that point, he’ decided to stay in and try and make his way down, away from the port itself, cloaked by darkness and by the natural unwillingness of anybody up there voluntarily to jump in this fetid mess. He didn’t like it, either, but anything he was going to catch from it he most certainly already had.

Like almost all river ports, the town was situated at a bend where the river slowed and deposited its silt, creating a flat, swampy land mass that none the less allowed for the docking of boats and the laying of foundations on pilings in the muck. At the far end the harbor stopped, as the water was far too shallow to be useful, leaving a good quarter of a mile of broad mud flats. Here, untouched by man’s attempt to control the land, was a slippery quagmire that, nonetheless, he could manage, although the scabbard of his sword dragged in it and occasionally made him lose his balance. By the time he reached firmer land, he was totally covered in sticky brown mud. He hauled himself up and sat in the harder mud near shore and coughed a bit. After a few minutes, he heard someone else, a woman, coughing as well.

“Who’s there?” he challenged.

“Joe? Is that you?”

“Ti? What the hell are you doing here in this mess?”

She made her way over to him. “Same as you, I guess. I tripped over something on the pier and the next thing I knew I was in the water. This seemed like the only way out.”

He laughed and soon she laughed with him. Finally he asked, “Irv?”

“Oh, he went in between the buildings. He’ll be fine. He knows where the camp is and he’s pretty street-wise, so I don’t think he’ll get in any real trouble.” She chuckled. “God! I must look a fright. As bad as you do! It’ll take me a week of washing to get this gook out of my hair!”

“Yeah, it’s almost a shame. Here we are alone together and free for the first time in a long time, and look at us! By the time we got anyplace decent the mud would dry us into statues.”

She thought about it. “Then maybe the trick is to make sure the mud doesn’t dry.”

“Huh? You mean—over there? In the mud?”

“Why not? Kinky, huh?”

He thought about it. “Well, why not? We can’t get any muddier.”

He was definitely wrong about that.

Still, it was a night to remember. Caked with the gooey stuff, they made their way to the edge of the flats, where the river made the full curve and began to pick up again, cleansed now. They were able to swim about and get as much off as they could, and it turned into one of those rare magical nights when it felt good to be alive.

Finally, they made their way back to the area just outside of town where they had been forced to camp, not then having the money to stay in town. The boy was sleeping there, and they stood there a moment and looked at him.

“You know, it’s kind of odd,” Joe commented. “You take the average person from Earth and stick them here, the kind who mows his lawn and works in an office nine-to-five and maybe goes to singles bars, and he’d be dead or enslaved in no time at all. But you take” a kid forced to live in a nasty neighborhood, surviving by his wits, facing danger all the time, like him, and he adapts pretty damned well. We could probably make a lot of folks happy if we could work it out so those kids in the street gangs got over here and some of our better people who just can’t hack it here went back there in their place.”

She shrugged. “He’s still just a boy.”

“Not here. Not anymore. But he’ll make it. He’ll do better here than he would back home, that’s for sure.”

“Of course he will,” she assured him. “He’s your son.”

Joe looked around at the quiet scene. “Yeah, he is. That’s what’s got me to wondering.”

“Huh?”

“He was on his own, in that town, with a fair piece of change, and since he’s the only one now who knows how much, we’ll never know if any of it was spent. I wonder how long he’s really been back here? I wonder how long he’s been asleep? I wonder how old and gray I’m gonna have to be to find out the answer to those questions? If ever,” he added.