The Midnight Circus

by Jane Yolen

  ‘‘I’m staying.”

  “You cannot.”

  Dog Boy made his hands into fists. More tears began to roll down his face. He expected to be beaten. It would not be the first time. Probably not the last. He was prepared for it.

  What he was not prepared for, though, was his father reaching into a pocket and taking out the leash, which Dog Boy hadn’t seen in years. Quickly, Red Cap bound him as easily and as tightly as he’d ever done when Dog Boy had been a child.

  For the first time Dog Boy could actually feel the leash’s power. Perhaps he felt it because he didn’t want to go where it willed him, where his father willed him. Always before he’d been eager to go outside, to smell the city scents, to do what his father would have him do. When he’d been little, he thought that the leash was only to keep him safe. He’d been proud the day he was old enough to go outside with Red Cap leashless. He believed he and his father had forged a team: two hunters, leaning on one another. He had the nose, his father kept him safe. Equals. He’d reveled in that.

  But now he understood the truth. The leash was not just a piece of leather to keep him from getting lost, to keep him out of harm’s way. There was something else about it. Something that glimmered on the inside. Something fierce. Something old that he was powerless to resist.

  Red Cap pulled on the leash and it drew Dog Boy relentlessly toward the door.

  “I want my fiddle and pipe.” His voice was high, but not pleading. He would not make his mother’s mistake. Pleading just gave his father some kind of strange pleasure.

  “You’ll not need it where we’re going.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Under the Hill.”

  For a moment he thought his father meant underground. It was something he’d watched on a TV show: a family on the run from the mafia had to go underground to escape certain death. Perhaps, he thought, his father meant the child they killed was the son of a mafia chieftain, or maybe the child of a policeman. Or the FBI.

  Underground. They’d be on the run. Together.

  But then he remembered the smile, the dipped hat, the blood, the obvious pleasure that his father had taken in the stalking, the killing of an innocent child. And he remembered something else. His father—for all that he was a bloodthirsty, vicious murderer—never lied. They were going Under the Hill, whatever that meant.

  Looking back at his mother’s body on the sofa, wrapped in the red and green coverlet, at the silver pipe on the table, at the fiddle in its case resting against the wall, Dog Boy told himself: Someday I will kill him for this. Once more the murdered boy was all but forgotten. By this, he meant his mother’s suicide.

  When I am old enough and big enough and strong enough, he will pay for this. Then I will take the red cap and dip it in his blood.

  He wondered if this was just a boy’s wish or whether it was a promise.

  “A pledge,” he whispered.

  Like his father, he did not lie.

  The Fisherman’s Wife

  JOHN MERTON was a fisherman. He brought up eels and elvers, little finny creatures and great sharptoothed monsters from the waves. He sold their flesh at markets and made necklaces of their teeth for the fairs.

  If you asked him, he would say that what he loved about the ocean was its vast silence, and wasn’t that why he had married him a wife the same. Deaf she was, and mute too, but she could talk with her hands, a flowing syncopation. He would tell you that, and it would be no lie. But there were times when he would go mad with her silences, as the sea can drive men mad, and he would leave the house to seek the babble of the marketplace. As meaningful as were her finger fantasies, they brought his ear no respite from the quiet.

  There was one time, though, that he left too soon, and it happened this way. It was a cold and gray morning, and he slammed the door on his wife, thinking she would not know it, forgetting there are other ways to hear. And as he walked along the shore, singing loudly to himself—so as to prime his ears—and swinging the basket of fish pies he had for the fair, he heard only the sound of his own voice. The hush of the waves might have told him something. The silence of the sea birds wheeling overhead.

  “Buy my pies,” he sang out in practice, his boots cutting great gashes like exclamation marks in the sand.

  Then he saw something washed up on the beach ahead. Now fishermen often find things left along the shore. The sea gives and it takes and as often gives back again. There is sometimes a profit to be turned on the gifts of the sea. But every fisherman knows that when you have dealings with the deep you leave something of yourself behind.

  It was no flotsam lying on the sand. It was a sea-queen, beached and gasping. John Merton stood over her, and his feet were as large as her head. Her body had a palegreenish cast to it. The scales of her fishlike tail ran up past her waist, and some small scales lay along her sides, sprinkled like shiny gray-green freckles on the paler skin. Her breasts were as smooth and golden as shells. Her supple shoulders and arms looked almost boneless. The green-brown hair that flowed from her head was the color and texture of wrackweed. There was nothing lovely about her at all, he thought, though she exerted an alien fascination. She struggled for breath and, finding it, blew it out again in clusters of large, luminescent bubbles that made a sound as of waves against the shore.

  And when John Merton bent down to look at her more closely still, it was as if he had dived into her eyes. They were ocean eyes, blue-green, and with golden flecks in the iris like minnows darting about. He could not stop staring. She seemed to call to him with those eyes, a calling louder than any sound could be in the air. He thought he heard his name, and yet he knew that she could not have spoken it. And he could not ask the mermaid about it, for how could she tell him? All fishermen know that mermaids cannot speak. They have no tongues.

  He bent down and picked her up and her tail wrapped around his waist, quick as an eel. He unwound it slowly, reluctantly, from his body and then, with a convulsive shudder, threw her from him back into the sea. She flipped her tail once, sang out in a low ululation, and was gone.

  He thought, wished really, that that would be the end of it, though he could not stop shuddering. He fancied he could still feel the tail around him, coldly constricting. He went on to the fair, sold all his pies, drank up the profit and started for home.

  He tried to convince himself that he had seen stranger things in the water. Worse—and better. Hadn’t he one day brought up a shark with a man’s hand in its stomach? A right hand with a ring on the third finger, a ring of tourmaline and gold that he now wore himself, vanity getting the better of superstition. He could have given it to his wife, Mair, but he kept it for himself, forgetting that the sea would have its due. And hadn’t he one night seen the stars reflecting their cold brilliance on the water as if the ocean itself stared up at him with a thousand eyes? Worse—and better. He reminded himself of his years culling the tides that swept rotting boards and babies’ shoes and kitchen cups to his feet. And the fish. And the eels. And the necklaces of teeth. Worse—and better.

  By the time he arrived home he had convinced himself of nothing but the fact that the mermaid was the nastiest and yet most compelling thing he had yet seen in the ocean. Still, he said nothing of it to Mair, for though she was a fisherman’s daughter and a fisherman’s wife; since she had been deaf from birth no one had ever let her go out to sea. He did not want her to be frightened; as frightened as he was himself.

  But Mair learned something of it, for that night when John Merton lay in bed with the great down quilt over him, he swam and cried and swam again in his sleep, keeping up stroke for stroke with the sea-queen. And he called out, “Cold, oh God, she’s so cold,” and pushed Mair away when she tried to wrap her arms around his waist for comfort. Oh, yes, she knew, even though she could not hear him, but what could she do? If he would not listen to her hands on his, there was no more help she could give.

  So, John Merton went out the next day with only his wife’s silent prayer
picked out by her fingers along his back. He did not turn for a kiss.

  And when he was out no more than half a mile, pulling strongly on the oars and ignoring the spray, the sea-queen leaped like a shot across his bow. He tried to look away, but he was not surprised. He tried not to see her webbed hand on the oarlock or the fingers as sure as wrackweed that gripped his wrist. But slowly, ever so slowly, he turned and stared at her, and the little golden fish in her eyes beckoned to him. Then he heard her speak, a great hollow of sound somewhere between a sigh and a song, that came from the grotto that was her mouth.

  “I will come,” he answered, now sure of her question, hearing in it all he had longed to hear from his wife. It was magic, to be sure, a compulsion, and he could not have denied it had he tried. He stood up, drew off his cap and tossed it onto the waves. Then he let the oars slip away and his life on land slip away and plunged into the water near the bobbing cap just a beat behind the mermaid’s flashing tail.

  A small wave swamped his boat. It half-sank, and the tide lugged it relentlessly back to the shore where it lay on the beach like a bloated whale.

  When they found the boat, John Merton’s mates thought him drowned. And they came to the house, their eyes tight with grief and their hands full of unsubtle mimings.

  “He is gone,” said their hands. “A husband to the sea.” For they never spoke of death and the ocean in the same breath, but disguised it with words of celebration.

  Mair thanked them with her fingers for the news they bore, but she was not sure that they told her the truth. Remembering her husband’s night dreams, she was not sure at all. And as she was a solitary person by nature, she took her own counsel. Then she waited until sunrise and went down to the shore.

  His boat was now hers by widow’s right. Using a pair of borrowed oars, she wrestled it into the sea.

  She had never been away from shore, and letting go of the land was not an easy thing. Her eyes lingered on the beach and sought out familiar rocks, a twisted tree, the humps of other boats that marked the shore. But at last she tired of the landmarks that had become so unfamiliar and turned her sights to the sea.

  Then, about half a mile out, where the sheltered bay gave way to the open sea, she saw something bobbing on the waves. A sodden blue knit cap. John Merton’s marker.

  “He sent it to me,” Mair thought. And in her eagerness to have it, she almost loosed the oars. But she calmed herself and rowed to the cap, fishing it out with her hands. Then she shipped the oars and stood up. Tying a great strong rope around her waist, with one end knotted firmly through the oarlock—not a sailor’s knot but a love knot, the kind that she might have plaited in her hair—Mair flung herself at the ocean.

  Down and down and down she went, through the seven layers of the sea.

  At first it was warm, with a cool light blue color hung with crystal teardrops. Little spotted fish, green and gold, were caught in each drop. And when she touched them, the bubbles burst and freed the fish, which darted off and out of sight.

  The next layer was cooler, an aquamarine with a fine, falling rain of gold. In and out of these golden strings swam slower creatures of the deep: bulging squid, ribboned sea snakes, knobby five-fingered stars. And the strands of gold parted before her like a curtain of beads and she could peer down into the colder, darker layers below.

  Down and down and down Mair went until she reached the ocean floor at last. And there was a path laid out, of finely colored sands edged round with shells, and statues made of bone. Anemones on their fleshy stalks waved at her as she passed, for her passage among them was marked with the swirlings of a strange new tide.

  At last she came to a palace that was carved out of coral. The doors and windows were arched and open, and through them passed the creatures of the sea.

  Mair walked into a single great hall. Ahead of her, on a small dais, was a divan made of coral, pink and gleaming. On this coral couch lay the sea-queen. Her tail and hair moved to the sway of the currents, but she was otherwise quite still. In the shadowed, filtered light of the hall, she seemed ageless and very beautiful.

  Mair moved closer, little bubbles breaking from her mouth like fragments of unspoken words. Her movement set up countercurrents in the hall. And suddenly, around the edges of her sight, she saw another movement. Turning, she saw ranged around her an army of bones, the husbands of the sea. Not a shred or tatter of skin clothed them, yet every skeleton was an armature from which the bones hung, as surely connected as they had been on land. The skeletons bowed to her, one after another, but Mair could see that they moved not on their own reckoning, but danced to the tunes piped through them by the tides. And though on land they would have each looked different, without hair, without eyes, without the subtle coverings of flesh, they were all the same.

  Mair covered her eyes with her hands for a moment, then she looked up. On the couch, the mermaid was smiling down at her with her tongueless mouth. She waved a supple arm at one whole wall of bone men and they moved again in the aftermath of her greeting.

  “Please,” said Mair, “please give me back my man.” She spoke with her hands, the only pleadings she knew. And the sea-queen seemed to understand, seemed to sense a sisterhood between them and gave her back greetings with fingers that swam as swiftly as any little fish.

  Then Mair knew that the mermaid was telling her to choose, choose one of the skeletons that had been men. Only they all looked alike, with their sea-filled eye sockets and their bony grins.

  “I will try,” she signed, and turned toward them.

  Slowly she walked the line of bitter bones. The first had yellow minnows fleeting though its hollow eyes. The second had a twining of green vines round its ribs. The third laughed a school of red fish out its mouth. The fourth had a pulsing anemone heart. And so on down the line she went, thinking with quiet irony on the identity of flesh.

  But as long as she looked, she could not tell John Merton from the rest. If he was there, he was only a hanging of bones indistinguishable from the others.

  She turned back to the divan to admit defeat, when a flash of green and gold caught her eye. It was a colder color than the rest—yet warmer, too. It was alien under the sea, as alien as she, and she turned toward its moving light.

  And then, on the third finger of one skeleton’s hand, she saw it—the tourmaline ring which her John had so prized. Pushing through the water toward him, sending dark eddies to the walls that set the skeletons writhing in response, she took up his skeletal hand. The fingers were brittle and stiff under hers.

  Quickly she untied the rope at her waist and looped it around the bones. She pulled them across her back and the white remnants of his fingers tightened around her waist.

  She tried to pull the ring from his hand, to leave something there for the sea. But the white knucklebones resisted. And though she feared it, Mair went hand over hand, hand over hand along the rope, and pulled them both out of the sea.

  She never looked back. And yet if she had looked, would she have seen the sea replace her man layer by layer? First it stuck the tatters of flesh and blue-green rivulets of veins along the bones. Then it clothed muscle and sinew with a fine covering of skin. Then hair and nails and the decorations of line. By the time they had risen through the seven strata of sea, he looked like John Merton once again.

  But she, who had worked so hard to save him, could not swim, and so it was John Merton himself who untied the rope and got them back to the boat. And it was John Merton himself who pulled them aboard and rowed them both to shore.

  And a time later, when Mair Merton sat up in bed, ready at last to taste a bit of the broth he had cooked for her, she asked him in her own way what it was that had occurred.

  “John Merton,” she signed, touching his fine strong arms with their covering of tanned skin and fine golden hair. “Tell me . . .”

  But he covered her hands with his, the hand that was still wearing the gold and tourmaline ring. He shook his head and the look in his eyes was enough.
For she could suddenly see past the sea-green eyes to the sockets beneath, and she understood that although she had brought him, a part of him would be left in the sea forever, for the sea takes its due.

  He opened his mouth to her then, and she saw it was hollow, as dark black as the deeps, and filled with the sound of waves.

  “Never mind, John Merton,” she signed on his hand, on his arms around her, into his hair. “The heart can speak, though the mouth be still. I will be loving you all the same.”

  And, of course, she did.

  Become a Warrior

  Both the hunted and the hunter pray to God.

  THE MOON hung like a bloody red ball over the silent battlefield. Only the shadows seemed to move. The men on the ground would never move again. And their women, sick with weeping, did not dare the field in the dark. It would be morning before they would come like crows to count their losses.

  But on the edge of the field there was a sudden tiny movement, and it was no shadow. Something small was creeping to the muddy hem of the battleground. Something knelt there, face shining with grief. A child, a girl, the youngest daughter of the king who had died that evening surrounded by all his sons.

  The girl looked across the dark field and, like her mother, like her sisters, like her aunts, did not dare put foot onto the bloody ground. But then she looked up at the moon and thought she saw her father’s face there. Not the father who lay with his innards spilled out into contorted hands. Not the one who had braided firesticks in his beard and charged into battle screaming. She thought she saw the father who had always sung her to sleep against the night terrors. The one who sat up with her when Great Graxyx haunted her dreams.