His first thought was that he’d done it, he’d overstepped, he was done for. He’d be blue-bodied for sure, or at least beaten into insensibility. In a moment this guilty fear passed as he realized he was alone, after all. No one knew he had come here. He needn’t … well, he needn’t tell anyone. And since no one knew where he was, he needn’t go back, not just yet.
In truth, he could not have made himself leave what he saw, what he smelled, what he heard in the music: the new, the strange, the marvelous. He was so intrigued that he sat down on the sill and settled into being a spectator.
He pretended to himself that he did not know who they were. If he ever got caught, he thought, the “ever” coming to mind quite clearly, if anyone “ever” asked him, he would say he didn’t know who they were. How could he? After all, he might not have noticed the garments that defined invisible people. How could he tell these were people who did not exist?
People who nonetheless were! People who leaped and spun around the fire in ecstatic, delirious movement, like willows in wind, their hair flowing like swirls of lovely water. They were more slender than people, almost sylph-like, and their skin had a sheen of opalescent gold, the ocher-apricot glow of freshly fired clay pots. And they sang! Their voices were like birds and breeze and the burble of water. Their hair was much more luxuriant than people’s hair, thicker and longer, and it almost seemed to rise and fall of itself, besides being of gorgeous and opulent colors: all the blues of the sea and the sky, shading to dark purple, all the greens of the forest and the fields shading to pale yellow. Mouche had seen hair colored so brilliantly only once before, on the small furry thing that he and Duster had befriended.
The dancers below him were clad only in diaphanous shifts, though after a time it struck him that the swirling veils weren’t clothing at all. The dancers had a sort of web that flowed from beneath their arms and down the outside of their legs. So far as Mouche could tell, they were all of one sex, whatever that sex was. They didn’t seem to have breasts or genitals, but each was definitely an individual, easy to distinguish from the rest. One particular form brought his eyes back again and again, a girl or youth he supposed one might say, one with soft moss-green hair flowing to its … no, her knees in a liquid stream that seemed to pour forever across his vision. His eyes went away and returned, went away and returned, unable to ignore the magic of that hair and the pattern of light that shifted along it like a fish sliding among eddies. Once or twice he caught the glimmer of her eyes, a startling mirror silver in the firelight.
Adding to his enchantment was music full of unfamiliar harmonies and rhythms, the tunk-a-tunk and tongy-dong of tuned wooden blocks and metal rods being struck with soft hammers. Also, there were marvelous odors from the foods seething over the fire, exotic spices and resinous smokes, all part of a marvelous and fascinating whole that gave him new sensations and awarenesses that caught him by the throat. What he saw, smelled, and heard wrapped him in a tingling web of stimulation that burned like a warm little sun, ripening him as a fruit on a vine, making him swell with sweet juices. His foot tapped, TIKa-tikaTUM tika-TIKatum. His eyes crinkled, he caught himself smiling as he could not remember smiling ever before. After the first few moments, he was lost in the spell of it.
And then … then they sang a song he knew. He knew it! He had heard it, not like this, with many singers and drums and wood blocks and bells, but still, he knew it. Someone had sung it to him, in this same language, and then later in his own …
Now, as that voice rose from below, he remembered the words in his own language:
Quaggima she calls: