The Midnight Circus

by Jane Yolen

  Minutes after Isak was taken, his daughter Miriamne came to my house with the Rod of Leaders. I carved my own sign below Isak’s and then spoke the solemn oath in our ancient tongue to Miriamne and the nine others who came to witness the passing of the stick. My sign was a snake, for my clan is Serpent. It had been exactly twelve rotations since the last member of Serpent had led the People here, but if the plague of angels lasted much longer, there would be no one else of my tribe to carry on in this place. We were not a warrior clan and I was the last. We had always been a small clan, and poor, ground under the heels of the more prosperous tribes.

  When the oath was done and properly attested to—we are a people of parchment and ink—we sat down at the table together to break bread.

  “We cannot stay longer,” began Josu. His big, bearded face was so crisscrossed with scars it looked like a map, and the southern hemisphere was moving angrily. “We must ask the faró to let us out of our contract.”

  “In all the years of our dealings with the Gipts,” I pointed out, “there has never been a broken contract. My father and yours, Josu, would turn in their graves knowing we even consider such a thing.” My father, comfortably dead these fifteen years back in the Homeland, would not have bothered turning, no matter what the cause. But Josu’s father, like all those of Scorpion, had been the anxious type, always looking for extra trouble. It took little imagination to picture him rotating in the earth like a lamb on a holiday spit.

  Miriamne wept silently in the corner, but her brothers pounded the table with fists as broad as hammers.

  “He must let us go!” Ur shouted.

  “Or at least,” his younger, larger brother added sensibly, “he must let us put off the work on his temple until the angels migrate north. It is almost summer.”

  Miriamne was weeping aloud now, though whether for Isak’s sudden bloody death or at the thought of his killers in the lush high valleys of the north was difficult to say.

  “It will do us no good to ask the faró to let us go,” I said. “For if we do, he will use us as the Gipts always use thieves, and that is not a happy prospect.” By us, of course, I meant me, for the faró’s wrath would be visited upon the asker, which, as leader, would be me. “But . . .” I paused, pauses being the coin of Serpent’s wisdom.

  They looked expectant.

  “If we could persuade the faró that this plague was meant for the Gipts and not us . . .” I left that thought in front of them. The Serpent clan is known for its deviousness and wit, and deviousness and wit were what was needed now, in this time of troubles.

  Miriamne stopped weeping. She walked around the table and stood behind me, putting her hands on my shoulders.

  “I stand behind Masha,” she said.

  “And I.” It was Ur, who always followed his sister’s lead. And so, one by one by one, the rest of the minon agreed. What the ten agreed to, the rest of the People in the land of the Gipts would do without question. In this loyalty lay our strength.

  I went at once to the great palace of the faró, for if I waited much longer he would not understand the urgency of my mission. The Gipts are a fat race with little memory, which is why they have others build them large reminders. The deserts around are littered with their monuments—stone and bone and mortar tokens cemented with the People’s blood. Ordinarily we do not complain of this. After all, we are the only ones who can satisfactorily plan and construct these mammoth memories. The Gipts are incapable on their own. Instead they squat upon their vast store of treasures, doling out golden tokens for work. It is a strange understanding we have, but no stranger than some of nature’s other associations. Does not the sharp-beaked plover feed upon the crocodile’s back? Does not the tiny remora cling to the shark?

  But this year the conditions in the Gipt kingdom had been intolerable. While we often lose a few of the People to the heat, to the badly-prepared Giptanese food, or to the ever-surprising visit of the Gipt pox, there had never before been such a year: plague after plague after plague. There were dark murmurs everywhere that our God had somehow been angered. And the last, this hideous infestation.

  Normally angels stay within their mountain fasts, feasting on wild goats and occasional nestlings. They are rarely seen, except from afar on their spiraling mating flights when the males circle the heavens, caroling and displaying their stiffened pinions and erections to their females who watch from the heights. (There are, of course, stories of Gipt women who, inflamed by the Sight of that strange, winged masculinity, run off into the wilds and are never seen again. Women of the People would never do such a thing.)

  However, this year there had been a severe drought and the mountain foliage was sparse. Many goats died of starvation. The angels, hungry for red meat, had found our veins carried the same sweet nectar. Working out on the monuments walking along the streets unprotected, we were easier prey than the horned goats. And the Gipts allow us to carry no weapons. It is in the contract.

  Fifty-seven had fallen to the angel claws, ten of them of my own precious clan. It was too many. We had to convince the faró that this plague was his problem and not ours. It would take all of the deviousness and wit of a true Serpent. I thought quickly as I walked down the great wide street, the Street of Memories, towards the palace of the faró.

  Because the Gipts think a woman’s face and ankle can cause unnecessary desire, both had to be suitably draped. I wore the traditional black robe and pants that covered my legs, and the black silk mask that hid all but my eyes. However, a builder needs to be able to move easily, and it was hot in this land, so my stomach and arms were bare. Those parts of the body were considered undistinguished by the Gipts. It occurred to me as I walked that my stomach and arms were thereby flashing unmistakable signals to any angels on the prowl. My grip on the Rod of Leadership tightened. I shifted to carry it between both hands. I would not go meekly, as Isak had, clamped from behind. I twirled and looked around, then glanced up and scanned the skies.

  There was nothing there but the clear, untrammeled blue of the Gipt summer canopy. Not even a bird wrote in lazy script across that slate.

  And so I got to the palace without incident. The streets had been as bare as the sky. Normally the streets would be a-squall with the People and other hirelings of the Gipts. They only traveled in donkey-drawn chairs and at night, when their overweight, ill-proportioned bodies can stand the heat. And since the angels are a diurnal race, bedding down in their aeries at night, Gipts and angels rarely meet.

  I knocked at the palace door. The guards, mercenaries hired from across the great water, their blackfaces mapped with ritual scars, opened the doors from within. I nodded slightly. In the ranks of the Gipts, the People were higher than they. However, it says in our holy books that all shall be equal, so I nodded.

  They did not return my greetings. Their own religion counted mercenaries as dead men until they came back home. The dead do not worry about the niceties of conversation.

  “Masha-la, Masha-la,” came a twittering cry.

  I looked up and saw the faró’s twenty sons bearing down on me, their foreshortened legs churning along the hall. Still too young to have gained the enormous weight that marked their elders, the boys climbed upon me like little monkeys. I was a great favorite at court, using my Serpent’s wit to construct wonder tales for their entertainment.

  “Masha-la, tell us a story.”

  I held out the Rod and they fell back, astonished to see it in my hand. It put an end to our casual story sessions. “I must see your father, the great faró,” I said.

  They raced back down the hall, chittering and smacking their lips as the smell of the food in the dining commons drew them in. I followed, knowing that the adult Gipts would be there as well, partaking of one of their day-long feasts.

  Two more black mercenaries opened the doors for me. Of a different tribe, these were tall and thin, the scarifications on their arms like jeweled bracelets of black beads. I nodded to them in passing. Their faces reflected nothin
g back.

  The hall was full of feeding Gipts, served by their slimmer women. On the next-to-highest tier, there was a line of couches on which lay seven huge men, the faró’s advisors. And on the high platform, overseeing them all, the mass of flesh that was the faró himself, one fat hand reaching toward a bowl of peeled grapes.

  “Greetings, oh high and mighty faró,” I said, my voice rising above the sounds in the hall.

  The faró smiled blandly and waved a lethargic hand. The rings on his fingers bit deeply into the engorged flesh. It is a joke amongst the People that one can tell the age of a Gipt as one does a tree, by counting the rings. Once put on, the rings become embedded by the encroaching fat. The many gems on the faró’s hand winked at me. He was very old.

  “Masha-la,” he spoke languidly, “it grieves me to see you with the Rod of your people.”

  “It grieves me even more, mighty faró, to greet you with my news. But it is something which you must know.” I projected my voice so that even the women in the kitchens could hear.

  “Say on,” said the faró.

  “These death-bearing angels are not so much a plague upon the People but are rather using us as an appetizer for Giptanese flesh,” I said. “Soon they will tire of our poor, ribby meat and gorge themselves on yours. Unless . . .” I paused.

  “Unless what, Leader of the People?” asked the faró.

  I was in trouble. Still, I had to go on. There was no turning back, and this the faró knew. “Unless my people take a small vacation across the great sea, returning when the angels are gone. We will bring more of the People and the monument will be done on time.”

  The faró’s greedy eyes glittered. “For no more than the promised amount?”

  “It is for your own good,” I whined. The faró expects petitioners to whine. It is in the contract under “Deportment Rules.”

  “I do not believe you, Masha-la,” said the faró. “But you tell a good story. Come back tomorrow.”

  That saved my own skin, but it did not help the rest. “These angels will be after the sons of the faró,” I said. It was a guess. Only the sons and occasional and unnecessary women still went out in the daylight. I am not sure why I said it. “And once they have tasted Gipt flesh . . .” I paused.

  There was a sudden and very real silence in the room. It was clear I had overstepped myself. It was clearer when the faró sat up. Slowly that mammoth body was raised with the help of two of the black guards. When he was seated upright, he put on his helm of office, with the decorated flaps that draped against his ears. He held out his hand and the guard on the right pushed the Great Gipt Crook into his pudgy palm.

  “You and your People will not go to the sea this year before time,” intoned the faró. “But tomorrow you will come to the kitchen and serve up your hand for my soup.”

  He banged the crook’s wide bottom on the floor three times. The guard took the crook from his hand. Then exhausted by the sentence he had passed on my hand— I hoped they would take the left, not the right—he lay down again and started to eat.

  I walked out, through doors opened by the shadow men, whose faces I forgot as soon as I saw them, out into the early eve, made blood red by the setting sun. I could hear the patter of the faró’s sons after me, but such was my agitation that I did not turn to warn them back. Instead I walked down the street composing a psalm to the cunning of my right hand, just in case.

  The chittering of the boys behind me increased and, just as I came to the door of Isak’s house, I turned and felt the weight of wind from above. I looked up and saw an angel swooping down on me, wings fast to its side in a perilous stoop like a hawk upon its prey. I fell back against the doorpost, reaching my right hand up in supplication. My fingers scraped against the nailed-up feathers. Instinctively I grabbed them and held them clenched in my fist. My left hand was down behind me scrabbling in the dirt. It mashed something on the ground. And then the angel was on me and my left hand joined the right pushing up against the awful thing.

  Angel claws were inches from my neck when something stopped the creature’s rush. Its wings whipped out and slowed its descent, and its great golden-haired head moved from side to side.

  It was then that I noticed its eyes. They were as blue as the Gipt sky—and as empty. The angel lifted its beautiful blank face upward and sniffed the air, pausing curiously several times at my outstretched hands. Then, pumping its mighty wings twice, it lifted away from me, banked sharply to the right, and took off in the direction of the palace, where the faró’s sons scattered before it like twigs in the wind.

  Two times the angel dropped down and came up with a child in its claw. I leaped to my feet, smeared the top of my stick with dung and feathers and chased after the beast, but I was too late. It was gone, a screaming boy in each talon, heading towards its aerie, where it would share its catch.

  What could I tell the faró that he would not already know from the hysterical children ahead of me? I walked back to my own house, carrying my stick above my head. It would protect me as no totem had before. I knew now what only dead men had known, the learning which they had gathered as the claws carried them above the earth! Angels are blind and hunt by smell. If we but smeared our sticks with their dung and feathers and carried this above our heads, we would be safe; we would be, in their “eyes,” angels.

  I washed my hands carefully, called the minon to me, and told them of my plan. We would go this night, as a people, to the faró. We would tell him that his people were cursed by our God now. The angels would come for them, but not for us. He would have to let us go.

  It was the children’s story that convinced him, as mine could not. Luck had it that the two boys taken were his eldest. Or perhaps not luck. As they were older, they were fatter—and slower. The angel came upon them first.

  Their flesh must have been sweet. In the morning we could hear the hover of angel wings outside, like a vast buzzing. Some of the People wanted to sneak away by night.

  “No,” I commanded, holding up the Rod of Leadership, somewhat darkened by the angel dung smeared over the top. “If we sneak away like thieves in the night, we will never work for the Gipts again. We must go tomorrow morning, in the light of day, through the cloud of angels. That way the faró and his people will know our power and the power of our God.”

  “But,” said Josu, “how can we be sure your plan will work? It is a devious one at best. I am not sure even I believe you.”

  “Watch!” I said and I opened the door, holding the Rod over my head. I hoped that what I believed to be so was so, but my heart felt like a marble in the mouth.

  The door slammed behind me and I knew faces pressed against the curtains of each window.

  And then I was alone in the courtyard, armed with but a stick and a prayer.

  The moment I walked outside, the hover of angels became agitated. They spiraled up and, like a line of enormous insects, winged toward me. As they approached, I prayed and put the stick above my head.

  The angels formed a great circle high over my head and one by one they dipped down, sniffed around the top of the Rod, then flew back to place. When they were satisfied, they wheeled off, flying in a phalanx, towards the farthest hills.

  At that, the doors of the houses opened, and the People emerged. Josu was first, his own stick, messy with angel dung, in hand.

  “Now, quick,” I said, “before the faró can see what we are doing, grab up what dung and feathers you find from that circle and smear it quickly on the doorposts of the houses. Later, when we are sure no one is watching, we can scrape it onto totems to carry with us to the sea.”

  And so it was done. The very next morning, with much blowing of horns and beating of drums, we left for the sea. But none of the faró’s people or his mercenaries came to see us off, though they followed us later.

  But that is another story altogether, and not a pretty tale at all.

  Names

  HER MOTHER'S NUMBER had been 0248960. It was still imprinted on he
r arm, burned into the flesh, a permanent journal entry. Rachel had heard the stories, recited over and over in the deadly monotone her mother took on to tell of the camp. Usually her mother had a beautiful voice, low, musical. Men admired it. Yet not a month went by that something was not said or read or heard that reminded her, and she began reciting the names, last names,

  in order, in a sepulchral accent:

  ABRAHMS

  BERLINER

  BRODSKY

  DANNENBERG

  FISCHER

  FRANK

  GLASSHEIM

  GOLDBLATT

  It was her one party trick, that recitation. But Rachel always knew that when the roll call was done, her mother would start the death-camp stories. Whether the audience wanted to hear them or not, she would surround them with their own guilt and besiege them with the tales:

  HEGELMAN

  ISAACS

  KAPLAN

  KOHN

  Her mother had been a child in the camp; had gone through puberty there; had left with her life. Had been lucky. The roll call was of the dead ones, the unlucky ones. The children in the camp had each been imprinted with a portion of the names, a living yahrzeit, little speaking candles; their eyes burning, their flesh burning, wax in the hands of the adults who had told them: “You must remember. If you do not remember, we never lived. If you do not remember, we never died.” And so they remembered.

  Rachel wondered if, all over the world, there were survivors, men and women who, like her mother, could recite those names:

  LEVITZ

  MAMOROWITZ

  MORGENSTERN

  NORENBERG

  ORENSTEIN

  REESE

  Some nights she dreamed of them: hundreds of old children, wizened toddlers, marching toward her, their arms over their heads to show the glowing numbers, reciting names.

  ROSENBLUM