Ensemble

by S. P. Elledge

men were heaping whole tree trunks and great uprooted stumps onto the mounting fire, and once more the strange music had begun, from out of nowhere, from the roiling clouds above, it seemed.

  The barber sat at his workbench after supper, carefully lining up the tools of his trade: the gleaming silver scissors, short and dangerously long, one pair with ebony handles, another with carved ivory; the various elegant razors, ingeniously designed with handles which the deadly blades retracted into with a press of a button; the beautiful set of mirrors whose faces shone and whose silverplated backs depicted castles and coronets and ducal crests. It was these mirrors he cherished the most–they had been given to him long, long ago by someone who had once loved him. He dipped his chamois cloth into the expensive polishing paste and rubbed it into the intricacies of these embellishments. Outside, he heard the church clock chiming the eighth hour. It was probably much later. One by one as he finished with the mirrors, he lined them up on the shelf above his workbench, until by the time the rain had stopped he gazed into five perfect images of himself. For a moment, as always, he was struck by just how old he was. How very old. The moment was just a moment, but in that moment whole decades of his life passed by: those dancehalls in a country which no longer existed, comrades he had loved in a war he had hated, years at sea as a ship’s barber, faraway harbors and the desert sea, and the past thirty-five years in this unknown place, where still the people were always asking him where was it he came from and why was it he had left.

  The mayor stood at his high stairwell window as the thunderstorm retreated over the crenellated foothills, gone to haunt other counties and other realms. The faltering sunset shone through the stained glass of the porthole window, and through the glass the mayor, by shifting his position just a bit at a time, could make the village without turn crimson, then cobalt, then the deepest, the richest of royal purples. It was then that the village, plain and simple as Puritan furniture, could take on the moonlit enchantment of a Bedouin oasis or perhaps become an underwater dreamland aglitter with gemstones and flashing fishes. In his fever, however, the village took on a more nightmarish cast this evening, drowned itself in a satanic rainbow, and the mayor stumbled on the top stair, sick now in his stomach as well as his head. Where was his maid? His cook? His groundskeeper or stableboy? Crumpled on the landing, unable to reach the bell-pull, he cursed the Old Ones, who were even now probably eating his venison, defiling his forests. The mayor cursed them as violently as he believed they had cursed him. They had taken his wife–they would take him, too, if he did not put up a fight.

  Night on the last day of June. Unlike most nights in June, this one had come on suddenly, as soon as the sun fell headlong like Icarus into the western mountains, with no afterglow or long rays to light the traveler’s way home. The schoolteacher had led the librarian to the edge of the ring of hearselike wagons, where it was dark in the shadows but the scene before them was lit by campfires like footlights along a proscenium. Any other girl might have run away, he thought, and he liked how curiosity kept her close by his side. He pressed her small hand now between his own as gently if not as permanently as she might have pressed a lady slipper within a Bible. The music now was most shrill and loud, although it came from just one source–a hurdy-gurdy, she told him, for she had seen a very old one once at the county fair. It was an ungainly, ancient instrument with an ancient, melancholy sound, sadly out of tune, with a melody as repetitious and mesmerizing as a snakecharmer’s. It belonged to not just another world, but another time–and so did these Old Ones before them.

  But they were no longer old! Where had those old people, tatterdemalion, ragamuffin, gone, the silent old gray people they had watched march wearily along with their horses and wagons that morning–where were they now? Perhaps they had all gone to bed, old as they were, as far as they had come, as late as it was. But then who were these magnificent young people, as elegant in their finery as the pretend courtiers in a melodrama the schoolteacher had seen at the opera house back home? Who were these youngsters in the parrot-colored attire and jewelry of some mystic, mythic land? Perhaps they had been secluded inside the wagons that morning, for fear they should be corrupted by the modern sights of the village and this modern, unchivalrous, nerve-deadening world. Yes, obviously they had been kept like extras in a play, in hiding until just this hour. There was no other explanation. The Old Ones were gone. Their horses and mules with braided manes and tails remained, however, quietly tethered to their wagons and already fattened on green grass. But the Old Ones were gone. That was enough to know. Their children–or more likely, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren, were here now, lighting now the bonfire in their midst and singing like children making up nonsense words, to the wavering tune of the hurdy-gurdy. Something sinister lurked beneath their glossy skin, to be sure, but only in that way wild creatures can appear menacing from a distance and so marvelous up close. As they gathered wood and chased each other around and about the wagons, there was much in their movements of wild creatures, something catlike and birdlike at the same time, and their undulating arms and wrists–their ankles and waists, too–were as slender as those the schoolteacher had seen once in a museum, on Nipponese or Daoist figures carved in jade.

  Flame and shadow flickered, smoke sweet as jasmine clouded the air, made their eyes water so it was hard to see clearly–yet, still it seemed quite possible that that was a coffin which had been perched at last atop the bonfire, like a narrow black canoe cresting a mighty wave. A coffin topped with branches of hemlock and garlands of summer flowers, and on its sides those same silver and gold emblems, Druidic runes or Coptic talismans to ensure its safety in the next world. Silver chains, too, wound through the hemlock, dangling from the coffin, and ribbons with cameos, beads of sapphire and malachite. It could be, too, that one lone crow circled above the fire, cawing as if it were calling out a name. This was all, apparently, what the fire was for, and the music, the celebration. The wood here was spiced like that of the Levantine, and the smell and smoke and heat were enough to make one swoon.

  The schoolteacher held tight to the librarian’s arm, though now neither of them feared a thing. For the beautiful youths were dancing, linking arms to ring the flaming pyre, and in their archaic clothes they were a scene from the Arabian nights, or a Minoan vase, or a medieval illumination of a maypole rite. It was too brilliant and lovely a picture to be afraid, like one torn from a book of children’s stories. The youths’ hair was black and glossy, hanging in heavy serpentine coils down their backs and across their foreheads or done up in twists and knots complex as the one Gordius tied. Their white teeth glistened and the whites of their eyes glistened, and their skin shone like polished stone in the firelight–porphyry, the schoolteacher recalled the word from a book, or translucent onyx, or empurpled marble. Around their necks they wore long ropes and chains strung with beads of porcelain and pearl and glass and bone and amber and quartz. The men wore pirate earrings that flashed in the firelight, and the women had little carbuncles in their noses and a dozen rings and amulets on every hand and wrist. Some of them had filigreed patterns, as if worked from precious metals, up and down their bared arms and shoulders. Others seemed to be spotted with tattoos like ocelots, or striped like the backs of jungle panthers. Their garments were of the stuff magic carpets are woven, multicolored and intricate as tapestries; their silky shirts, sashes, and pantaloons were like those Cossacks wear, or maybe Persian pashas; and their skirts were sometimes wide, sometimes narrow, but always of sumptuous color and contour–gossamer fabrics of the ladies of a harem, or of the Rubaiyat, or the butterfly-brightest maidens of the Coral Sea, in some lost empire of the Indies. The young men and women danced in their ring, wondrous wild, intoning a chant in syllables long and clear but unreal as crows who mock human speech, and one naked giant of a boy, a eunuch or djinni perhaps, painted gold in gold leaf from head to toe, turned the crank of the hurdy-gurdy, all as stars began to peer through the
smoke and insects and owls began their nightsong in the endless forests beyond this theater of light.

  In the village, too, one could hear the music, though so distant it might have been something else–wind high in the elms, a distant waterfall, a lovesick nightjar. The old barber, at his bedroom window, knew better, though. He had heard this music so long ago it seemed someone else’s life, someone about whom he’d read in a book. Music like this he’d once heard at the dark end of a cobbled alley, around the corner of an empty arcade, in abandoned cities after the war. The barber lingered at his window. The only light in town was the illuminated face of the church steeple clock, up the road: its hands read 10:15, but the barber knew the clock was rarely accurate. But, oh, yes–there was a fainter light much farther up the road, a kaleidoscopic light scattered like jewels in the dust. The mayor’s house, of course–his beloved stained glass, with its absurd portrayal of a ship upon a wave-tossed sea. Here, of all places, so very far