Black Light

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.

“Tulamaka.”

The word came to me as though breathed in my ear, but it was not Ralph’s voice. Beyond the circle of dancers the redhaired girl’s eyes locked with mine. If I had any doubt before that she could see me, at this moment I had none; nor that she recognized me.

“Balthazar would say that she called you ‘fire-spirit,’ whispered Ralph. “Or ‘guardian of the forest,’ or ‘beast-wife,’ or ‘mistress of animals,’ or ‘bacchante.’

“But what she actually said is none of those things. Her name for you is unknowable, because it is no one thing. That is what the Benandanti will never understand. There are gods upon gods down the eons, and goddesses as well; and other things which the Benandanti have no name for—and thus they have no knowledge of them.

“But these are what the Malandanti serve. The unknown: the unknowable. That is why they give themselves no name, and also why their gods have many names; whereas the Benandanti believe that their master has but one.”

I tried to shake my head, found I couldn’t move. With great effort I spoke. “But—what are the Benandanti?”

Ralph’s voice grew harsh. “It is what they call themselves—‘The Good Walkers,’ and also ‘Those Who Do Well.’ That is how they see themselves: as the protectors of this world, keeping it safe from what they perceive to be dangerous to its order, and their own. But those who set themselves against the Benandanti are not treated gently, Lit—do not ever fool yourself into believing that. Even those who have served them loyally for time out of mind, may one day find themselves cast out, and—”

He fell silent. His hands upon my neck relaxed, and as they did I discovered that I could move again— though slowly, painfully, as though I were recovering from some injury. I turned to see the dance continuing before us, the dusk unaltered except where a few brilliant stars now blazed within the sky. There were more dancers now, some of them dressed in clothes that seemed less archaic though still strange to my eyes—robes and loose trousers, ribbons of bright yellow like saris or sarongs, the bright motley of harlequins. Many of the dancers were naked, or nearly so, their garments torn; and as I watched I saw another figure join the endless chain—one of the herders I had first glimpsed upon the taiga. Before I had thought its panoply of beads and leather ribands belonged to a woman, her long hair braided with bright red tassels.

But now as the figure took its place within the circle I saw that it was a man dressed as a woman. His face had been carefully scraped of any hair and his lips reddened, the same coppery color as the girl’s unbound tresses. When he moved it was with an elaborate effeminacy, his hands drawing circles in the air as he stood on one leg, like a heron, and then began the same strange hopping dance as the others. I thought of what Ralph had just told me, that the Benandanti—whoever they were—could name these things but not comprehend them.

I believed him. The man-woman ducked in and out between the other dancers, his arms snaking through the air. He did not look ridiculous, but frightening: his eyes wide and staring, his mouth a red gash in a face powdered white with wood-ash. As he leaped his braid tossed wildly, and its crimson tassels crowned his head like feathers, or horns.

And suddenly I knew what he reminded me of—the cave painting I had seen in the Nursery five years before. The same blankly staring eyes; the same slashed mouth. But strangest of all was the way one leg was raised, a clumsy accessory to the dance—and that, too, reflected the image of a man in animal costume, his foot injured or grotesquely foreshortened.

“But I’ve seen him!” I cried, pointing.

“Who?”

“That one, there—”

But already the man-woman was gone, lost within the moving circle. I pulled away from Ralph, no longer caring if it was cold, no longer caring if I was a million miles or a million light-years from Kamensic. “I saw him,” I repeated angrily. “At the Nursery when I was twelve. There was a painting there—a cave painting, it was hanging in one of the rooms. Kissy Hardwick saw it, too—she sat and talked to me for a while. It was right before she died…”

My voice trailed off. I thought of the girl in the torn blue dress, her patchwork bag spilling open on the floor between us to scatter its glittering array, pills and peacock feathers, tarot cards and earrings and a knife carved of bone…

“She had a knife,” I said. My eyes widened but I no longer saw Ralph, only that archaic blade, its handle burned russet and scored with minuscule lines. “She said she was his godchild, too, and that we were all real— she said that we were all real…”

“You are,” whispered Ralph. “Watch—”

In my mind’s eye a small dirty hand still grasped the bone knife, turning it so that light touched the tiny incisions, momentarily causing them to glow. Then it was as though someone tossed dust into my face. My eyes teared as I drew back and raised a hand before me.

But there was no dust clouding the air; only a small spare figure standing alone beneath a birch tree. The circle dance had retreated, so that they were small black columns ranged against the purple sky. So had the little group of reindeer herders. They were perhaps fifty feet away, no longer tending their animals but aligned side by side, watching the redhaired girl. Beside her stood the white reindeer, head upraised.

And it remained thus, absolutely still. Were it not for the way its skin shuddered beneath the skeins of midges upon its flanks, I would have thought it a statue carved of stone or snow. Beside the reindeer lay the bulky, fur-wrapped bundle that had been carried by its mate, and above it stood the girl, gazing at the birch with her hands cupped in front of her. In the eerily charged light I could see her clearly—the too-vivid stain of cinnabar and ochre upon her hair, a network of reddish lines striating her cheeks. Her eyes were wide open, the pupils lost within silvery irises, and that, too, gave me a flash of the figure in the cave painting with its maddening stare.

“Why does she look like that?” I whispered.

“Poppies,” said Ralph. “Papaver somniferum…”

He bent and let his fingers play with a dried stalk, one of thousands nodding in the night wind; then straightened, stripping dead leaves and an oval seed-capsule from its tip. He held it out to me, a small brown