by Lloyd Kropp
“You’ll find out when the dance begins,” said Tabor. “I don’t want to spoil it for you.”
“When does it start?”
“In a half hour or so. As soon as all the clans get here.” And then he shouted something in Spanish to a group of young men who had just arrived at the other end of the boat. They laughed and shouted something back to him. “It won’t be long now,” he said to Peter. “Here come The Bluewaters.”
Many people had already arrived. They sat in a large circle now around the edges of the blue space on an arrangement of kegs and boxes, dividing themselves into five groups, corresponding to their clans. Peter and Tabor sat near Bright, Tabor’s children, and the other Mary Strattfords. Across from them was The Vague Noire clan of French Canadians and Germans. The Bluewater and Conquistador Blanco clans sat to his left. To his right were The Madrids, by far the largest group. In this clan the people were all dark-skinned and black-haired. Some of them, Tabor believed, were descendants of Spanish explorers that had come to The Drift hundreds of years ago. Others were Brazilians, Portuguese, and Cubans. The Madrid children were especially noisy. They climbed all over each other and over their parents, played elaborate shadowgames, and chattered in shrill, staccato voices.
Each clan, Tabor explained, had certain customs that were peculiar to it, and each had a section of The Drift that it marked off for its own: The Mary Strattfords and The Madrids formed two sides of a large wedge whose broad side included all of The Northside Cliff and whose point came almost exactly to the center of The Drift. The Vague Noires lived in the southeast quadrant along the east or Mary Strattford side of the wedge, while the Conquistador Blancos lived along The Seafields below The Madrids. The Bluewaters, famous for their music, held a strip along the south and southwest that led up to The Bridge, the narrow western point of The Drift where all the musicians gathered in the evenings. But generally speaking, the territorial divisions were vague, and there were no restrictions on trespassing or taking things from different ships. In fact, the idea of owning ships or groups of ships was in itself a very nominal concept, practically meaningless except as it applied to the clanboats.
“Each of the clans,” Tabor was saying, “has its own character. That’s a much more important thing than the geographical boundaries. We Mary Strattfords, for example, are considered to be the leaders and organizers for most of the important activities, in spite of our small numbers. The Madrids, on the other hand, are the most creative and outgoing, and there is also a standing joke about them being the best seducers and lovers, because they have so many children. The Bluewaters are the best musicians; they play their songs to anyone who will listen. The Conquistador Blancos are the cooks and wine makers. They make a yellowish alcoholic drink out of God knows what that’s very popular, though I don’t especially care for it. The Vague Noires are very nice to everyone, but they stay mostly to themselves except on festival days. I think this is partly because their language, more than any of the others, is a mixture of many tongues, and it’s very hard to understand. Only the children can speak it perfectly.”
Then Peter noticed that one of the barrels in the Madrid section stood apart from all the others in that it was painted a bright blue. Presently a tall, dark-skinned man with long white hair took his place on it. He carried a trio of hand drums.
“Listen,” said Tabor. “It’s beginning.” And with that he moved away to another place where a large barrel provided him a better vantage point. He waved to Peter and then pointed to the old man.
But to Peter it did not seem that anything in particular had begun. Everyone waved to the man with the drums and called out to him, but the old man did not answer or acknowledge their greeting in any way. He stared at the blue floor in front of him. Presently, amid the noise of the children and the voices of the adults chattering in three or four languages, he began to play. At first he could not be heard over all the commotion, but after a minute or so the beating grew louder. The young men in The Madrid clan began to listen; then gradually the others fell silent. Soon the man on the blue barrel was the focal point of the entire gathering. His small drums had little resonance, but in the silence their sound began to grow in Peter’s mind. The first drum made a very sharp sound; the other two were muffled and soft, forming a contrapuntal pattern of echoes. After ten minutes everyone was silent. Everyone listened to the drums.
Then Pao appeared at the edge of the circle. He had never seen her look more beautiful. Her long black hair was braided and fixed in a loop at the back of her head. She wore a pair of black trousers and a man’s white shirt. She stood for a moment without moving, and then for a brief instant the drums stopped.
“The Dance of The Nine Islands,” she said.
Then the drums began beating again, this time much faster than before. Pao began to dance. Peter could tell from her dress and from her mannish gestures as she pushed an imaginary boat into the water that she was playing the part of a man, a voyager across a painted blue ocean. Her dance progressed in a series of undulating motions. Her whole body rolled from side to side with the pitch and yawl of her ship. Several times she raised her arms together out in front of her, closed her fingers, and then swung gently on the weight of an imaginary line. Her eyes closed. Slowly she danced toward the first tarpaulin, stepping sideways, then rising on her toes, then sinking and stepping back in the swell and deep of the waves of that netted blue ocean. Once she opened her eyes and peered out toward the horizon; another time she glanced upward to the point of her sail and then shielded her eyes to see the position of the sun. Always she moved at an oblique angle, never forward, never sideways. Slowly the billowing slant of her imaginary sail carried her on toward the first tarpaulin. The drums became the sound of wind and the sound of water.
She stopped near the edge of the tarpaulin.
“The Island of The Twelve Golden Fruit Trees, where oranges hang like burning lamps.” Her voice was like the drums and the water and the wind.
With these words, the twelve trees threw off their tarpaulin and slowly rose to their feet. They were dressed in green. Each wore a crown of green weeds, and a pair of bright orange spheres hung from a short length of twine held in each hand. Their dance moved in a slow, wide circle around the edge of their island. They made low sighing noises. The arms and trunks of the trees swayed, each, it seemed, responding to a different wind, for the complex pattern of their dance moved their branches into a myriad of clustering, many-pointed shapes, like a series of slow starbursts.
The sailor moved around the island, gazing at the twelve trees and the golden fruit that swung from their branches. Once she tried to land, but the trees very gently blocked her way. Once she tried to seize one of the oranges, but the trees smiled and lifted their branches up out of reach. Regretfully the sailor sailed away. The twelve trees closed their eyes, murmured in a sleep of voices, pulled their tarpaulin back over them, and sank into silence.
Her second journey took her again into the open sea. For several minutes she sailed in wide circles until she reached the second island.
“The Island of Flowers In Profusion, where The White Spirits dance in The Immortal Fields.”
Here nine men dressed in white hoods arose, threw off their tarpaulin, and began a long procession across the island. The procession consisted of three rows that intersected each other at odd angles. The regularity of the procession was broken when occasionally one figure would turn his head and wait for another to cross his path, or when, quite suddenly, one figure would leap into the air and raise his arms above his head. All of The White Spirits moved in small quick steps that gave a ghostly oriental sense of gliding rather than walking. Occasionally one of them would smile at the sailor, who was still circling the island. Once the sailor tried to land, but one of the spirits shook his head and blocked the way with his arms.
The third journey took the sailor to the third island.
“The Island of The White Clown of The Mountain, who made the oceans from his own br
eathing and plucked stars from the sky to make The Nine Islands,” cried the sailor.
The Island of The White Clown was taller than any of the others. The tarpaulin peaked nearly eight feet above the ocean. Under it, a single figure slowly began to move. When the tarpaulin fell away it revealed a man sitting on a high stool of blue and silver, dressed in a loose-fitting robe that fell to the ground in a white pool of linen. In one hand he held a small silver harp that had no strings. A ghostly white paint covered his face except for one large symmetrical tear, a spot of bright blue, that fell from the corner of one eye.
The sailor anchored a few feet offshore and shielded his eyes against the white eminence of the great figure sitting on his throne. Slowly The White Clown played his hands across the empty wedge of the harp and cocked his ear to catch the soundless melody, and all the shapes beneath all the canvases began to sway to the music. Then he sang in a high, reedy voice. His singing was a sprightly jumble of syllables that ended at regular intervals with an inexplicably mournful “tra-la, tra-la.” When his song was over, he smiled at the sailor, reached into his mouth, and pulled out a silver key. He turned it in the sunlight so that its reflection made a tiny spot of light that moved across the water, around the boat, and finally rested on the sailor’s forehead. Then The White Clown threw his key toward the boat, reached down behind him, and drew the dark canvas over himself and over his island.
The sailor caught the silver key in his hand. He turned it over and over, and then slowly sailed away to the fourth island.
“The First Island of Fire.”
Here a man dressed all in red stood in the center of the island, writhing like a flame. His arms turned and bent in many directions. His fingers stretched open and pointed to the sailor. His nails undulated like fingers of fire, and the mask he wore peaked above his head in a fiery pinnacle. Looking neither to the left nor the right, the sailor carefully guided his ship along the shoreline of that dangerous island. Once he brushed against the fiery fingers. Still he did not turn his head or look behind him.
The sailor’s fifth journey brought him to the fifth island.
“The Island of The Winds, where the air whistles through the rocks and caves.” This time the sailor spoke more softly and in a more natural way. The ritual intonation in his voice had disappeared.
At the fifth island the sailor himself removed the tarpaulin. Beneath it were fourteen figures, all painted gray, except for their hands, and all naked, except for loincloths. They sat, kneeled or squatted in weird angular positions, some with their shoulders hunched, some with an elbow protruding, some curled up in balls, some with large loops made with outstretched arms. None of them moved.
The sailor pulled his boat toward the shore, dropped an imaginary anchor, and landed. Slowly, curiously, he picked his way among the gray, sleeping forms, shielding his eyes against the wind. Occasionally he would sit on one of them, lean his chin in his hand, and contemplate the sea. Once he pushed one of the rocks with his foot and watched it roll head over heels into the water. “Splash,” said the rock. And the other rocks laughed very softly.
The sailor’s sixth journey took him to the sixth island.
“The Island of The Old Enchantress, who sings to all the men who live on all the islands,” she said.
The sailor reached beneath the canvas and pulled out a five-foot pole fixed to a wooden stand. A foot or so from the top of the pole was a small spar from which fluttered a square piece of sailcloth. When the sailor removed this apparatus, the whole canvas collapsed, for there was no one underneath.
Carefully the sailor set the sail at the edge of the island. Then, much to Peter’s discomfort, he removed his shirt, and the illusion of the sailor was no more. Pao then wrapped the sleeves of her shirt around the T-spar in such a way that they hung on either side like arms. When this was done she crawled under the tarpaulin.
When, after a moment of stillness, she threw off the tarpaulin and stared at the sail stand and the shirt, Peter began to understand. The sail was the boat, the shirt represented the sailor, and Pao was now The Enchantress.
In spite of her nakedness, the dance did not at first seem very immodest. It consisted mostly of rapid turns made about a small point of space, broken by a series of attitudes in which she would remain absolutely still except for a flowerlike movement of her wrists and fingers. It was the dance of an enchantress, but the enchantment was not exclusively a sexual enchantment. At various times during the sequence, she produced objects out of nowhere like a magician; the objects seemed in some way to be a part of the meaning of the dance. First, an ancient lamp which she lit with an imaginary brand and then threw into the water. Later, a silk scarf of many bright streaks of color. When she finally began to move toward the sailor, it trailed behind her like a wake, and Peter thought of Iris, the messenger of the gods, whose thousand-mile cloak was the rainbow that mortals saw after her long journeys through the sky. Once she produced the key from her own mouth that The White Clown had given her, and threw it toward the sailor’s boat. Once she found a wooden flute floating in the water and on it she played a slow oriental melody.
Finally The Enchantress pulled the boat to the shore of her island and began to dance around it. Now her motion was more overtly seductive. She picked up the two sleeves of the shirt and began to sway back and forth, rocking the boat and the sailor from one side to another. Slowly she drew it toward the center of the island.
Peter did not quite understand what the parts of the dance signified or how they went together, and yet he felt a unity in all the disparate images. The lamp, the scarf, and the key had, he supposed, some sort of metaphysical significance, and now all these things echoed, like variations on a theme, in the slow seduction of the sailor. The dance seemed to mean that the mystery of man and woman together was the mystery of all things: the lamplight of all wisdom, the color of all beautiful images, the key to man’s search for another world that would somehow be a revelation of human purpose. The power and intensity of her lovemaking was like the spinning of heat and energy in that first whirling place on the first day of creation. For man, the wonder of woman. For woman, the ecstasy of surrender in which she rises finally to conquer her lover.
But somewhere in this dance of passion and creation he sensed curious, comic sadness that he could not quite identify or name. It made him think of the large blue tear painted on the cheek of The White Clown.
Then the drums stopped. Then a short sputter of drumbeats. Then silence again. Then three sharp beats in uneven rhythm. Against this pattern of silence and sudden, irregular beats, The Enchantress stood in a kind of tense uncertainty that seemed like a fusion of action and inaction. Once, her head turned. Once, the arch of her foot lifted as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Once, she pressed her fingers against her legs, stretching them and then relaxing. Then, in what seemed to be a continuous motion, The Enchantress circled one leg and one arm around the puppet sailor and the mast of his ship, slid to the ground, turned the boat over on its side with her leg, and pulled the black tarpaulin over her, the boat, and the sailor.
For Peter, the last three journeys were an anticlimax. And yet, like the others, they were intensely interesting. It was only that now his feeling, if not his mind, was beginning to slide away from the dancing. It was as if he were falling from a great distance into a pool of dark water where Pao waited for him.
Pao’s seventh journey, once again as the sailor, brought her to “The Island of The Ten Giants, who tend their gardens and their sheepfold.” She mingled with the giants, worked with them, watched the cycle of the seasons passing from winter to spring and from planting time to harvest time. After a while the giants carried her back to her ship and again she was on her way.
Next came a second Island of Fire, where again she navigated near the shore of an island where her ship barely avoided the flaming fingers of another fire monster, this time a larger and more ferocious one.
Next came “The Island of Unending
Night, where The Black Narwhales eat the heads of the fishermen of all The Islands.”
Here the tarpaulin was not removed. Not by Pao, who sailed three times around the black shore, not by the dark shapes that moved and groaned and laughed beneath the tarpaulin. Sometimes one of them would rise up so that his form was partly visible beneath the covering: a pointed head. The black semblance of a draped arm. At the end of her third circling, Pao pointed her ship back into the open sea.
“The Island of The Twelve Golden Fruit Trees, where oranges hang like burning lamps,” she cried.
She had come full circle from paradise to earth to hell and then back to paradise. Now the trees repeated their dance, and one of them removed a green branch from his head and threw it to Pao. She caught it and raised her arms above her head. Then she went to the center of the ocean, stood for a moment in silence, and then pulled a gold pin from the coil of hair looped at the back of her head. Her long hair tumbled down.
“Let us make our circle for The Dance of The Nine Islands,” she said, “for it is the circle and the dance of all our fears and all our desires.”
With that, all the creatures of all the islands—the trees, the spirits, The White Clown, the rocks, the giants, the fire monsters, and The Black Narwhales—threw off their tarpaulins, and joined Pao in the center of the blue circle. The drums beat louder. Pao was now the center of the dancing spiral that wound and then unwound and then wound again. Soon everyone in the audience had joined the dance. They sang, waved their arms in the air, and Peter was borne up among them like a cork rising on a giant wave. It was impossible, unthinkable, to resist the momentum of their dancing and their singing. The spiral wound, unwound into a circle, and then wound into a spiral again. And in the center of the spiral, Pao whirled like a dervish until one of the young men caught her.
The dancers shouted and leaped into the air, and finally, after a space of time that he could not measure, people began to fall away from the dance, sprawling across the netted blue circle, and the spiral of shouting dancers disintegrated into broken lines that wheeled every which way. The drums continued for a minute or so, then settled into a long, arhythmical roll of sound, then stopped. The last few dancers had fallen to the deck of the ship. No one moved. There was no sound but the sound of heavy breathing, the distant cries of birds, and the creaking of wood.