The January Dancer

An Craic

“A goltraí, then,” the harper says. “A Lament for Hugh O’Carroll.” And her harp sings so mournfully that half the patrons in the room grow inexplicably teary-eyed.

The scarred man listens for a while, but without visible effect. “They are mad, you know,” he says. “The Eireannaughta are. But what can you expect from a folk who live on a raft upon a sea of seething magma? The Big Blow can come at any time, so it’s not surprising that they themselves erupt now and then.”

“Did Jumdar intend to keep the Dancer, or did she really mean to send it to Old ’Saken?”

“Not at first, I think; and in the end, it wasn’t her decision to make. What happened to Jumdar is of little interest, except to Jumdar. No, if you must have a lament, the truly tragic figure in the story is Handsome Jack Garrity.”

The harper is surprised and her fingers hesitate and still. “Is he? Why?”

“Because he was a man who won everything and gained nothing, and what worse fate is there than that? He found himself a deputy commissioner in a minor office. Small beer for the Hero of New Down Town. That’s why his struggle with the Ghost came to consume him. It was the one time in his life when he had mattered.”

The harper strums a mockingly conventional military march. “I’d not call him a hero.”

“No? What is a hero, then? Surely, a man larger than life, who acts with courage, who controls his contending emotions—his anger, fear, and despair—to achieve his goal. Handsome Jack did not succumb to despair until after he had won. Can only those be heroes who show courage in causes you favor? The Ghost of Ardow, maybe?” The scarred man gestures broadly with his arm, as if the Ghost has entered the Bar and the scarred man is introducing him.

“No.” And her earlier Lament turns twisted and jangled, and she sets the harp down at last and balls her hands on the table. “But I had thought he was a better man. Not an assassin, not a murderer.” She seems much affected. There are, it appears, emotions whose music is silence.

The scarred man laughs hideously. “But give him this much: at least he excelled. We suppose there is a difference between killing a particular man quickly and efficiently, and killing many men wholesale on a battlefield. Maybe you can explain the difference to us.”

“The heroic man,” she says quietly, “conquers himself.”

At this, the scarred man falls silent for a while. Then he takes his uisce bowl and spins it toward the far side of the table, where the harper snatches it before it falls off. “That’s a struggle,” he suggests darkly, “in which some of us find ourselves outnumbered.” He looks at the bowl and then at the harper.

The message is clear. She signals to the Bartender, and shortly, the “water-of-life” has been replenished. The harper receives unasked a bowl of her own, and she raises it to her lips. It is an awful, numbing liquor with the one obvious purpose of numbing something awful.

“Do you know what’s funny?” the scarred man asks her. But he doesn’t wait for an answer. “Hugh O’Carroll was a schoolteacher by vocation. That was why he was in the Southern Vale when it all broke out. All he ever wanted to do was teach children.”

“Where did he go?” the harper asks. “Where did his men address the crate?”

The scarred man grins like a skull. “Where does any such residuum wash up?”

“Ah.” The harper turns and looks out at the Barroom and studies the men in it. “Not a very glorious end for a legend.”

“Who says that was the end? It wasn’t the end of the man, nor even of the legend, though legends are always harder to end. We spoke, he and I, at that table there by the window”—a bony finger points—“and we got the whole story out of him.”

The harper reaches for her instrument. “So, then it’s to Jehovah next.”

“No. There is one more beginning.”