The January Dancer

An Craic

“Wait,” cries the harper. “Wait!” Her harp is stilled and she has half risen from her seat. “What do you mean she already loved another? Who was it? Why have I heard nothing of him? She always said that—”

She stops abruptly, but the scarred man seizes upon the caesura. “She always said?” His voice rises from his gravelly whisper to a growl. He is a sleeping predator surprised in his den. His age has not stilled his joints and as fast as a black mamba striking he has seized her wrist and holds her tight against her flight. “How do you know what she ‘always said’?” His eyes pin her as the snake pins a bird, his face as hard as flint.

Until flint cracks into shale and slides.

“Oh, by the gods! Oh, by the gods, you are her daughter! You’ve lied to me this whole time!”

His rising voice has turned a few heads in the broad common room of the Bar. A man in the uniform of a Gladiolan “cop” sees how he holds her restrained by her wrist and, scowling, rises from his seat. The Bartender reaches under the bar and something black and metallic emerges in his fist.

The scarred man sees all this, as he sees everything but the woman before him, with only a part of his attention. He might almost welcome their assault, so ready is he to fight the world over this latest of betrayals. But in the end, and this end takes but a moment to achieve, he releases her.

And she does not run. He has not answered her question.

“I’ve not lied to you,” she tells him.

“Your silence was your lie. Be gone. Go. The story’s ended.”

But she does not move. “There are three sorts of ends, you told me; and this seems like none of them.”

But the scarred man is not to be comforted from his rage. He shoves the table violently aside, toppling goblets, shrieking its legs against the flooring, and he bolts from his niche in the wall. He moves swiftly, half bent over, and he passes like a ghost through the crowded room. The Great Doors swing wide, and he is gone.

The harper hurries after, but when she emerges onto Greaseline Street, there is no sign of him, not northward toward the spaceport, not southward toward the Hostel. Then she turns and looks past the Bar’s rooftop where the ramshackle Corner of Jehovah and its tangled warren of alleys clutter the slopes of Mount Tabor.