Firedance

by Steven Barnes

  There was a fluidity to it that he had never achieved in his own practice. He wanted to weep.

  The ritual lasted an hour. By the end of that time, they had twisted and contorted their bodies into a variety of shapes and clusters, and a very faint memory, far back in Aubry’s mind, said that what they were doing correctly was what he had done incorrectly for decades.…

  Old Man came up from behind Aubry, so quietly that Aubry was almost unaware of it until they were shoulder to shoulder.

  “This is the first level,” Old Man said. “And you see that they have the fluidity that you lack.”

  “Yes—but it is still beautiful.”

  Old Man nodded. “But there is more than beauty. There must be function. We have little need of the higher levels, the warrior levels, now. Thomas Jai was one of the last who understood the warrior-hunter ways of our people. We are miners, now.” Something in Old Man’s smile put the lie to those words.

  He gripped Aubry’s shoulder. “But you… we would have you show us the extent of your knowledge. Some of us remember the old ways …” He smiled. “For tradition. Tradition is important.”

  10

  SEPTEMBER 28

  Trucks and trams, and men and women traveling on foot and in private cars, small skimmers and light airplanes, appeared continuously throughout the following day. Dinner was an unending stream of meats and fowl and fruits and vegetables and fish, serving at least five thousand who had gathered for the Firedance celebration.

  Aubry hadn’t eaten much of it. He was being observed, and knew that he was being observed. The whispers of “American,” and “Abomination,” put him on edge.

  The trays were cleared away. The diners formed a gigantic circle on the ceremonial earth mound where the Rubber Band had been practiced earlier.

  The youngest Ibandi men of the tribe stripped down to loincloths, and carried six-foot spears—the traditional weapon of the Ibandi. Old Man and another dozen elders gathered in the center. Old Man used his spear as a walking stick, leaned on it, and began to speak.

  “In the beginning,” Old Man said, “there were the wild grasses, and the animals, and the sky. And then came the white people. The white people tried to take our mountains. They tried to move into the deserts, and sent their soldiers. They rode the trains into our territory. And they died, all of them. And we still have the spears whose heads we made from their railroad spikes!” He slammed the butt of his spear upon the ground, and the night was filled with hooting.

  “But the days in which we roamed free were at an end. The world reached out for us, and we could never go back to the old, free ways. This we knew, this we understood from the very beginning. The white people knew it as well.

  “We had our own ways and our own gods. And one day, one of us rose up. This man was a priest of our people. He knew our ways, knew the Five Songs, the traditions of our wisdom. The power of our priest is the power to heal the hearts of the men who kill to protect the tribe. He reached out to the warriors of Uganda, of Zaire, of Tanzania and Kenya. And the soldiers listened to him, and followed him, and rose up to throw off their leaders.”

  Old Man looked directly at Aubry.

  “His name was Phillipe Swarna. He left his people, left the Ibandi, carrying with him our knowledge of the heart and body, and went out into the world. And when he was in the world, he shared his wisdom with many who were not worthy. And we watched. And were not pleased.

  “And when he rose up in the world, we sought to remind him that he had betrayed his roots, sought to expose him to his own incongruency. And when he refused to listen, and we strove to warn the people, he sent soldiers against us, and drove us into the strongholds of the Iron Mountain. And further than this he could not go. He tried, and we fought back. And we killed his soldiers here in the mountains.

  “Then he signed the paper with us, and this truce he has never broken. When he made parley with the men from Japan, he offered education to our children that would allow them to grow in the world of the present, and we saw that many of our ways had been the ways of the past. And there has been peace.”

  Old Man walked a somber circle on the axis of his spear. “But now one calls, who has the right to call. There are the old songs, and the old ways, and we must answer, because to fail to answer is to lose ourselves, lose our hearts. And so we bring to our bosom, bring to the Iron Mountain, a lost child.”

  Old Man bade Aubry rise. He did, and walked to the center of the mound and paused, deafened by his own heartbeat. And he scanned their intelligently inquisitive faces.

  “Who are you?” Old Man asked.

  Aubry opened his mouth and started to answer, and then remembered another man, or perhaps the phantasm of a man, who had asked a similar question, long ago. And there was no rational answer. He felt himself floating, riding on inner rhythms, and said, in a small voice, “A child, glad to be home.”

  He expected laughter, or derision, but instead, there was a nodding of heads. Those wise, dark faces creased in smiles.

  “Show us,” Old Man said. “Show us what you remember.”

  And Aubry began. He already knew that there were errors in his practice of the Firedance. He also knew that it would be dishonest to try to correct them now, to change what he had done so many tens of thousands of times.

  So he performed his morning exercises, and became so locked into the flow of the breathing, the power of the movements, that he was hardly aware that the night sounds around him had faded completely away.

  When he stopped an hour later, his body steamed with sweat. Every muscle was stretched and strengthened and wrung to its maximum, yet there was still no sound.

  Old Man strode forward and took his hand.

  “This you did,” Old Man asked, his voice trembling, “with no teacher for thirty years?”

  Aubry swallowed hard, realizing that something enormous hung in the balance, that his next words had some devastating impact on the remainder of his life.

  “Yes. Father … Thomas Jai, the man who I called my father … taught me these things, and then he died.”

  “How did he die?”

  “There was a fight. He tried to help. I remember …”

  He closed his eyes.…

  11

  It was a cold night, and the man Aubry called Father was walking with the child he called his son. As they passed by one of the alleys in the area called South Central Los Angeles, both heard a scuffling sound.

  The sounds and the sights, even the smells came back to Aubry clearly, closely, and he was murmuring aloud without even realizing that that was what he was doing.

  “I saw him. There were three of them, attacking a woman. All of them had weapons. My father … tried to stop them. He was large. Strong. But the one that held the woman down was larger. My … father pushed him. It was a small thing, it didn’t look like much, but the man flew. He flew. My father reached out with the tip of his … walking stick.”

  Old Man’s eyes widened. “Ah. He used a stick, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he did not hit the man?”

  “No. I remember. He reached out slowly, and not until the stick was in contact with the second man’s body did he push. I heard a snap. The man flew away, and smashed into the wall. The man looked … very surprised.”

  “Yes, I imagine that he was.”

  “The third man stabbed my father, and then ran away. I tried to help him….”

  Aubry shook his head, and then bowed it.

  “And you have been alone since that time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which of the Songs do you know?”

  “Songs?” Aubry asked, mystified.

  The old man closed his eyes. “Songs. We sing them to help the memory. Europeans would have written them down as books, five books of sacred knowledge, knowledge of all things external and internal. So. You do not know the correct form of the movements, and you do not know the Songs. And yet you have achieved all that you have.” H
e clucked, smiling. “It is a tribute both to you, and to the movement system taught you by Thomas Jai.”

  He took Aubry’s hands. “I would like to welcome you home. I would be honored to complete your education.”

  Aubry’s head swam. “Complete…?”

  “Yes,” Old Man said. “Every movement of the Firedance has an internal component. Each has a sound. Together the sounds make up the Songs. The songs that you should have learned.”

  He called out two of the youngest boys, and they flowed through the movements, each limb moving in perfect sequence, every joint rotating in perfect order. It was a miracle of motion, and their breathing shaped itself into words, into music. Into a kinetic rhapsody. It took him into another world, into a place inside himself, where colors and geometric forms danced and swayed.

  “What is this?” Aubry whispered.

  “We are the Ibandi. Every people on this planet has their gift to give. The Ibandi have a special gift. We have known of the arts which are called yoga, and called karate or aiki, for thousands of years. The human body has not changed. Instrumentation has changed. We developed ways of teaching our children the laws of mind and body, in a balanced matrix. Mind, body, spirit, together. None more important than the others. Thomas Jai gave you your body. He did not live to give you the keys to mind and heart.”

  Aubry was entranced, bound by strands of melody, by patterns of perfectly synchronized movement. His own body twitched, responding to the deeply etched memories of that motion. Each separate sound seemed to reverberate in a different part of him. There was a high note that made his head ring like a temple bell. He was intoxicated by light.

  “Today,” Old Man said, “beginning tonight, you will be given the keys of your manhood ceremony.

  “Aubry Knight,” he said. “You may leave this place, and return to your world.”

  “No,” Aubry said quietly.

  “What? What did you say?”

  Aubry’s eyes felt as if they were swelling. “I said no. I want it all.”

  “You wish to claim your manhood.”

  “Yes.”

  “You wish to become a warrior of your tribe.”

  “Yes.”

  “You will let no fear, no pain, no past bitterness stand between you and your destiny.”

  “No.”

  “You are willing to belong first to yourself, and then to your people, and only after that to the things of the outer world?”

  He swallowed, hard. “Yes.”

  “Then you will join us. We will light the fire within you. You will bring that flame to the Firedance. And there you will make your choice.”

  12

  Aubry awoke from a fantasy of open veldt and clear night sky. The awakening was sudden, but not abrupt, as smooth a transition from dream to wakefulness as any he had known.

  Tanesha knelt by the side of the bed. She wore a cloak of elegantly woven cotton, and smelled like honey. Her face was very clear, and direct, and at peace.

  Aubry sat up, staring at her. “What is this?”

  “The ritual begins,” she said.

  “What am I …”

  Her face tilted up, and he almost fell into her eyes. There was depth enough for five of him. “You must leave behind everything that you have known. The Songs are five. Songs of Earth, Wind, Fire, Death, and Birth. Body, Mind, Emotion, Spirit … and Void. Void is the emptiness, the unknowable. It is woman. You must be born anew, into the Void, or you will never survive the Fire.”

  The blood roared in his ears. What of Promise?

  You must belong first to yourself …

  And if he belonged first to himself, then what happened between him and Tanesha had nothing to do with his vows to Promise.

  Did Promise belong first to herself? Yes. Always. More than he ever had. And she did what she did because it served her, and the world she sought to build. And if their places were reversed, how would he feel…?

  Terrible. Jealous. Betrayed.

  But would he have been betrayed? If she needed to heal herself; if, away from him, she needed to learn or experience something … would it be a betrayal if she returned to him? So what if he hurt. Did he own her body even if not there to love her?

  If she belonged first to herself, the answer was no. Even if it hurt him …

  No. That was the lie.

  Even if he hurt himself with the knowledge of what she had done. She had promised to love and cherish him, to grow with him. She had never promised to be his property. He would hurt, if he knew. But the hurt was his concern, not hers.

  She cannot hurt me, unless I make it so.

  And I cannot hurt her.

  God. Is this the truth?

  Tanesha knelt by the side of the bed, awaiting his decision.

  His hand shaking, Aubry threw the cover back, and drew her into the bed next to him.

  13

  “I am you,” she said. “I am the Feminine side of yourself. It is through interaction with the Feminine that the Masculine is defined. It is through interaction with the Masculine that the Feminine is defined. To one who has never seen light, the concept of darkness has no meaning.”

  She took his hand and placed it on her left breast. Through the robe, he could feel her heart beating, a steady, healthy dance of life.

  “Have you ever felt a woman’s heartbeat?” she asked quietly. “Or have you always been too eager to reach the fire?” Her voice had a hint of tease in it.

  “You were not born of woman, Aubry Knight. You never knew the call of your mother’s heartbeat, floating there within her body, warm and safe. You never knew this.” Puzzled, he started to speak, but Tanesha shushed him with her lips. She parted the robe, and Aubry smoothed her skin with his hand, seeking to feel the steady pumping flow within her, seeking the source of her aliveness. Her flesh was smooth, and very warm.

  Gingerly, Aubry laid his head against her chest, his ear above her heart, and listened to the ka-shoosh ka-shoosh as it rumbled through its hundred thousand daily contractions.

  “Find my breathing,” she said, “and match it with your own. Synchronize. Listen to my heart. I have no limit, Aubry Knight. Take from me the comfort you have sought for a lifetime. Take from me, and build the woman inside you. Everything that lives is born of woman,” she whispered. “And tonight is your time to be born.”

  14

  How long he lay there, he didn’t know. But it seemed to Aubry that in listening to her heartbeat, and breathing as she breathed, a great calm settled over him. Perhaps solely because of the focus of his concentration, it seemed his body was filled with light.

  Her hands urged him gently to move up, to touch his lips to hers, to part them slightly so that their breath could join, so that her exhalations became his inhalations and vice versa, so that it seemed they were feeding each other. The sensation of lightness, of ascent to some far peak, grew even stronger.

  It’s the carbon dioxide, his mind said, and he noticed that the part of his mind that questioned and judged and evaluated was a distant, chattering thing, sounding more and more like a chipmunk.

  Her eyes held him. Her heartbeat held him. He was enthralled by her breathing, each measured breath taking him simultaneously deeper and higher, until he felt intoxicated, above, outside of, beyond his mind.

  Her eyes rolled up slightly, as if she were slipping into a deeper trance, and her breathing and heartbeat slowed, and he slipped deeper, suddenly losing awareness of his body as a thing separate from hers, not even noticing when her hands searched his body, stroked between his legs and caressed him, drew him down and into her. She clasped him in warmth and wetness, in a soft, sweet vise that rocked him, cradled him, and her body arched, pulling him more deeply inside as her hands gently urged him to keep the rhythm of the breath, as her heart took him deeper into the Void.

  It was a sensation beyond his knowledge, a dance on the edge of destruction, a loss of self that was simultaneously a grasping of something …

  Something …


  Beyond his conception.

  He didn’t know when it happened, but he slowly began to take control of the pace of the breathing. Her heartbeat began to follow his. His hands urged her body to greater, more sinuously sensuous effort

  The shared breath became, at his urging, the ultimate kiss, a melding of wetness and fire that spurred them on blindly. Their eyes locked, breath locked, heartbeats locked, their hips drove as their stomach muscles rippled in harmony, her eyes flew wide—

  There was a strangled scream, a twisting of her body as she strove to break contact, when she felt her fingers twist in his, as his body drove her into the sheets—

  And there was a great roaring, a physical sound like the rolling of a great wheel or the changing of a tide, and he felt the bottom of his world fall from beneath him, and he struggled to escape her, suddenly realized that somehow in the moment of surrender she had gained control, and he screamed without sound—

  And his body cried out—

  And hers—

  And at the last moment they achieved some kind of savage parity, gripping as a wall of fire swept them both, taking them through all harshness, all strength, into a softness that was the essence of life itself.

  And into darkness.

  Aubry lay on his side, not thinking, not dreaming. His body hummed like a slumbering dynamo.

  He stared into the darkness. He stared at his hand, seeing it for the first time. Listened to his breathing, finally realizing what a marvelous thing it was to breathe, to drink air, to be alive.

  He turned to Tanesha, and ran his fingers wonderingly along her face.

  “Thank you,” he said at last. And as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized how absurd they were.

  A single tear glistened at the corner of her right eye. As he watched, it spilled over and trailed down her dark cheek. “I have to go now,” she said.

  Stay with me.…

  “Tomorrow, you will have to face the same choice made by every young Ibandi. Most venture no closer to the flame. I think that you will want more. I think that you will want the Firedance.”