“Roll ‘em to,”Herb told the crewmen and the great steel shield rolled shut.
High up in the eaves of the cavern, Ol, Tib and Rind watched Cyber Circus pitch once then settle and drift away into the caverns beyond.
“Bye, bye,” said Ol. She rattled off a little dance with her knock-knees.
“Won’t get no key to heaven from the nice lady now.” Rind shook her head sadly.
“Won’t need one either. We’re gonna stay put, bed down with these shitters. Me and Ol will be their shepherds, and you can be their Queen,” said Tib. He gave Rind’s shell a gentle stroke with a claw. “Queen of the swarm.”
Rind smiled, a queer show of teeth in her little old face. Queen? She liked the sound of that.
With her brother and sister following in her wake, Rind clattered down the cavern wall and went to meet her people.
NINETEEN
Deralisee was a bustling hive of people, beasts and colour. The Festival of Saints was in full swing. Garlands crisscrossed the streets, strung from gas lamps and the windows of eateries, brothels, salons, general stores, alongside the printing press, farrier, barber, tanner, jail and schoolhouse. Statues of the Saints stood on every street corner – forlorn sculptures made of dirt and dung, then painted pretty. Pilgrims cluttered up the place, come to sample the sacred waters at the natural spring. Saint Azena herself, giver of clarity, was said to have rested at the spot once and partaken of the liquid on offer from a small rift in Deralisee’s bedrock. Cashing in on the fact over the centuries, the citizens of Deralisee had established a shrine over the site and developed itself into quite the religious destination. Zen monks milled through the crowds like silent demons. Children gawked. Parents shuffled their families quickly by.
While the Sirinese had their magic men and the Jeridians their sacred spirits, both cultures were happy to congregate at the festival with a common aim. To relieve the pilgrim of his or her dollars. Jeridians paraded, waving great etched banners proclaiming, ‘Warrior for hire’, ‘Have dust? Can handle’, ‘Gang Stock’, and the like. The Sirinese, meanwhile, were more subtle. They kept to the shadows, where they engaged in wagered wrestling bouts or took a rich man’s coin and told him his fortune. Come festival time, Deralisee was ablaze with shame, sin, and piety.
“And punters!” Herb had declared when the circus finally took to the western trail again, having waited out the worst of the dust storm at the caverns’ entrance. “The dimes flow freely when a man is Saint Blessed,” he’d told the company.
And it had sounded good. To haul up for the remainder of the Hamatan season in a spot that was ripe with passing trade. A night’s passage it had taken, during which Nim had been ministered by the woman and sweated out the poison, her Jeridian genes helping her to heal. Swinging in over Deralisee’s permanent carnival pitch, Cyber Circus had descended out of one of the last blue skies of the year, a colossal beast of brass and biomorphed flesh, to take centre stage amongst Deralisee’s bountiful celebrations.
The lights dim. All is hushed inside the green-tinged underworld of the circus tent.
A soft melody begins to pipe from the calliope. Notes that are fine and sweet, like longed-for rain. She appears – a figure in white beneath the blaze of a spotlight. Her dress is enticingly translucent; it skims her ankles and clings to her thighs, waist, ribs and breasts. Her hair is a cascade of orange flame.
When she dances, Desirous Nim seems to ripple like a petticoat pegged out to dry in the wind. So beautifully she arches her bare feet, lifting and lowering her arms like water flowing – and isn’t she divine? This exquisite desert flower. This fragile reed.
The drums start to beat. Soft at first, as a steady heartbeat. Building and building over time. The lights dim further so that the crowd are forced to squeeze up their eyes and peer into the gloom. The drums grow ever more agitated, rolling over themselves into sonic waves.
Boom! Boom! Boom! The base drum kicks in. Nim sets herself ablaze and the drums turn tribal. She’s shining now from beneath her made-new skin – a light storm of purest white.
Which is when a second figure takes to the stage. An offbeat beauty. Eyes set wide. Mouth slashed like a scar. Her clothes are pinned tighter at places it won’t show, petticoats and a scarlet corset borrowed from Nim. Her stage name is Charm, Conjuress of Seasons. She steps up into the circus ring, and her hands lift and the dust across the ground begins to dance.
The drums beat ever faster. The dust swirls, a magnetised cobra. It breezes out past the edges of the ring, lifts and swooping over the heads of the gasping audience. In time, Charm brings the magic grains back inside the circle and waltzes with them spilt out over her two hands. At the centre of the ring, Nim continues to flood the circus tent with her gleam while Charm directs the dust to ripple in beneath the courtesan’s feet.
Liftng her hands towards the spot-lit heavens, Charm agitates the motes to rise. On a wave of pulsing drums and spellbound dust, Nim ascends ten metres above the ground. She pirouettes air-bound. Light spills out from the heart of her over the world of the circus.
The others emerge then from behind the backstage curtain. A ladyboy flashing teeth and feminine wiles as he skips about the ring. The pig man who is yet awkward on the stage but grunts and squeals with bold enthusiasm. A savage black-eyed girl who bounds in on all four limbs, jaw snapping, gore matted in her mane. And the HawkEye, a man of flesh and metal who scans the crowd with his whirring eyepiece and stalks into the centre of the ring. He holds a hand up to Nim and she takes it.
On a balcony above, the ringmaster hops from foot to foot, waving his extravagant feathered hat as the calliope pipes its last song of the night.
“Goodnight ladies. Goodnight gentlemen. Goodnight Saints and goodnight sinners. Goodnight one and all from the sensational, lavational, electrisical, metaphysical Cyber Circus!”
BLACK SUNDAY
Friday April 12, 1935
Wesley Sanders edged the drink onto the table.
“There ya’rl, Miss Nightingale. Iced lemonade, or as Momma’s prone to call it, sunlight in a glass.”
The eight year old grinned. His teeth were large and very white, as if slicked with whitewash like the exterior of the Grace Presbyterian Church. His cheeks were nut-brown apples.
Carrie-Anne leant forward in her rocker and put her toes to the floor. She smiled back. “Thank you, Wesley. Tell your momma, she sure does know how to soothe the spirit.”
Wesley bobbed his cap. He waltzed off down the porch, humming one of those slow sad negro church songs he was prone to. Even after he’d swung through the inner gauze and disappeared inside the house, Carrie-Anne could hear the tune. It seemed to nestle down inside the dry Oklahoma heat and stay there, whispering at her.
She picked up the lemonade, rested the sole of a bare foot against the table and rocked. Julie Sander’s eldest, Abraham, had painted the porch a light grey colour before he’d abandoned Bromide for Oklahoma City last fall. That afternoon, the paint shade complimented the troubled sky where blue and lavender clouds roiled.
A storm was coming. What kind, Carrie-Anne wasn’t sure. This time of year, it could be hail, could be lightning, could be a twister. But she welcomed it. The weather was unseasonably close. It licked at the nape of her neck where her shoulder-length hair clung, and at each underarm, leaving sweat stains on her new cotton dress. Everything induced slumber. Except the cold lemonade.
Carrie-Anne put the glass to her lips and sipped. She wanted to stay mindful. The back gate needed fixing; she’d set the new yardman on it with instructions to go about replacing the struts. One of her stockings had a run that wouldn’t darn itself. Plus the whole house needed airing.