Where the furred hood had been was a brilliant corona of red hair, unbound and streaming in the wind like a pennon. It framed a face sun-coarsened and angular as the others’, but even in that remote place utterly unmistakable. The same tilted nose, the same black eyebrows belying that bright hair; the same pale, almost silvery gray eyes. I had stepped through a portal in Bolerium, to stand beneath an eternal arctic sunset and gaze upon myself.
“No!”
I yanked free from Ralph, shouting. As I did the red-haired girl jerked her head upright and stared at me, her expression mirroring my own.
“Stop it!” hissed Ralph. Before I could dart away he grabbed me again. “Can’t you tell? She sees you!”
I froze. Because indeed the girl continued to gaze at me, pale eyes narrowed, mouth pursed as though about to speak. The others remained apart from her, tending their herd and the two children, who were busy gathering twigs and brush for a fire. At the redhaired girl’s side the white reindeer nuzzled at the ground. After a minute she reached to lay one hand upon its flank. Her eyes never left mine.
The realization that she could see me was terrifying. I buried my face in Ralph’s jacket, but it was no use. Within moments I was peering out at her once more. He began to stroke my hair, murmuring wordlessly; and that suddenly made me think of something.
“It can’t be me. My hair isn’t real. Ali hennaed it for me this afternoon…”
Ralph shrugged. “Neither is hers—”
He held up his hand, thumb and forefingers still stained from the ochre he had toyed with earlier. “It’s what they do—”
“Who? Who does it? Who is she?”
“She is as you see her: a girl, your age. I do not know her name, but perhaps she does not have one; at least, not what we would recognize as a name. She is their go-between, their navigator. Their pathfinder. She travels between this world and the realm of the dead. Her people call her samdanan, She Who Dances. But if you were to study ethnology under Professor Warnick at the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine, he would tell you that samdanan is just another word for shaman, and that it shares its roots with the Sanskrit sraman, which is not dissimilar to the Mongolian samoroj, or the Manchurian sam-dambi, which means ‘to dance.’
“Yet if you were to visit the village of Moruzzo several hundred years ago, the farmers would call her strega: a witch; just as they named Polly Twomey here in Kamensic. But there is still another word for what she is, Lit—
“Malandante.”
As I listened the scene in front of me began to blur; not as though I were passing through another portal, but as though a pale scrim had descended from the twilit sky. But it did not hide the taiga, or the redhaired girl and her antlered familiar. Instead other, more shadowy figures began to move beside her. They were no more of that time or place than I was, and yet they were somehow known to me, as though I had dreamed of them long ago, or seen them in a film which until now I had forgotten. A girl in a white shift, her face streaked with soot. Another girl in a blue dress and bright earrings. A rangy longhaired figure in a veil which I at first thought was another girl, but whose face beneath coarse linen was that of a man, clumsily rouged and with blackened lips. They walked back and forth in front of the redhaired girl, insubstantial as smoke and completely oblivious of each other. When a few moments had passed, first one and then another began to execute a crude sort of dance. So awkward were they that it was several minutes before I realized they were dancing—hopping up and down on one foot and moving in gradually widening circles, away from the girl Ralph had named samdanan, dust rising where they stepped.
And this, too, was grotesquely familiar. It filled me with horror, even as I struggled to recall where I had seen such a thing before, this clumsy, almost monstrous display of—
What? Mockery? Revulsion? Their movements were too crude to seem part of any sacred ritual, and yet they were undeniably choreographed, and undeniably alike. Even if the dancers took no notice of each other, even if they somehow were taking part in this bizarre performance over a period of thousands of years: still it was the same dance. In the midst of it all the redhaired girl remained motionless, her hand still upon the reindeer’s flank, her eyes watching me across the centuries.
“She sees you as you see them,” said Ralph. “And as you see her—as patterns in the dance. It is the one thing she can recognize down through the ages, the one thing that is not bound by the taiga or by her own time—
“—just as it is the only thing that you perceive, Lit,” he ended softly.
“I don’t know what you mean.” The hopping steps of the ghostly figures was hypnotic; it was an effort for me to form the words. “I don’t know anything about dancing, or—or any of this…”
Ralph shook his head. “I didn’t say you knew anything about the dance, Lit. I said you could see it. Just as she does. Do she think she understands? Do you think she recognizes us, or knows any more of our world than we do of hers?”
“But—but we do,” I said weakly. “You said so, you said she was called—a magician or something, you said Professor Warnick taught you—”
“Professor Warnick knows nothing!” Ralph’s voice rang out, so keen with rage I shrank back and expected the dancers to do the same. But he might have been a moth fluttering in the night sky, for all the notice they paid him. “He and his masters give names to things, that’s all, and think themselves wise! As though naming a thing is knowing it!
“Do you know what they call them, Lit? Malandanti. It means Those Who Do Ill—yet it means nothing, because it is only a perversion of what the Benandanti call themselves! And they have ever been blind to those things which they did not create, those things they did not name—
“But what this means is that they are blind to the entire world. Because even though they would like to believe that their god created it, and that their god watches over it as though it were a naughty child—still the world escapes them. They have no more understanding of its true nature than you or I do of theirs—”
He pointed at the phantom dancers. Their steps had become synchronized, so that even though they moved without seeing each other, they now formed a single chain, heads bobbing and arms extended as they hopped in a widening circle beneath the solitary birch. Of the herders, only the redhaired girl appeared to see them. The weird twilight had grown deeper. It touched her with a soft purplish glow and made her hair spark like copper wire, and flowed between the dancers so that they seemed to be stepping in and out of a moving stream. Now it was those others and their antlered mounts who seemed insubstantial, bright streaks upon a moving backdrop. I shook my head, struggling with a sensation that was not so much drowsiness as a deadening languor. I felt as though I had been dropped in amber and was slowly turning to stone. When Ralph placed his hands upon my shoulders I did not move; nor when he stroked my collarbone, pushing back the jacket I had been wearing so that it dropped to the ground. I no longer felt the cold, or the wind; though I could see where it rippled the leaves of the birch tree, and stirred the rustling mat of undergrowth. I could feel nothing but Ralph Casson’s touch.