His voice was suddenly drowned out by an ululation from the Speck woman. Before her cry died out, the Speck men took it up, modulating it to a deep-voiced chanting. They spaced their voices, like children singing a round, producing a strange echoing sound. Slowly, feet shuffling, they began to circle the woman. She stood, her arms uplifted like a tree’s branches, and swayed in place as she sang in a pure, sweet soprano. It did not matter that we did not speak the language. I could hear the wind blowing and rain dripping from leaves in her song. The men circled her slowly, once, then twice. The crowd drew closer to the cage, transfixed by the strange dance and odd song. Each of the men dipped a hand into his pouch and drew forth a handful of fine dark dust. They began to shake their hands over their heads as they danced round the woman. The dust leaked from between their fingers to float free in the air around them. The woman’s voice suddenly rose in an extended note she held for an impossibly long time. Again the men circled her, dancing in close and then out in a larger circle. Again, they dipped their hands into their pouches and shook the dust free in the air as they danced. The woman swayed like a tree in the wind, and the crowd oohed in awe as a ghostly wind shushed through the tent in seeming harmony with the dance. It carried the floating dust over the crowd and several people sneezed, raising brief flurries of laughter from those around them.
The dance went on and on. Long after I had wearied of it, I was trapped there. The crowd behind us pressed us close to the cage bars. Rory especially seemed enraptured by the woman and her song. He gripped the bars with both hands and hung on, as if he were the one imprisoned by her wildness. I saw the keeper look at him twice, and feared the man would come to bang his knuckles, but the press of the mob trapped the man as effectively as it did us.
The woman’s song and the men’s chanting built to a crescendo. Their shuffling dance became a swift walk, then a jog, and suddenly they were running round the edges of the cage, even the old man, even the limping Speck, and they flung their dust in handfuls that drifted out over the crowd. People suddenly cried out as the dust stung their eyes. Coughing and sneezing, I turned my head away from the dance and tried to push my way back into the gathered folk, to no avail. The dust I had inhaled burned in the back of my throat and left a fetid taste in my mouth. The keeper was shrieking at the Specks to stop, stop, and suddenly they did.
Without a glance at their keeper, all of them gathered silently in the middle of their enclosure. The men upended their little dust bags and shook them, but nothing fell out. The woman stood in their midst and briefly set a hand on top of each of their heads, almost like a benediction. Then they turned, and with no acknowledgment to the crowd at all, nor to the rain of coins that were showering onto the straw, they retreated to their crude shelter and huddled there, showing us only their striped backs. Their heads bent together as they conferred about something.
Almost immediately the crowd began to break up, but it was some moments before we could move away from our spot. “I never saw anything like that before,” Trist said. He knuckled at his eyes, reddened where the dust had hit them. I turned a little aside from my fellows and spat several times, trying to clear the foul taste from my mouth. I wiped my mouth with my handkerchief, and almost immediately had a violent sneezing fit. Around me, other people were coughing.
Rory clung to the bars still. “She is, well, she is somethin’,” Rory agreed. His mouth hung slightly ajar as he stared at the woman huddling in the shadows of the crate.
“You want her?”
We all turned, startled, at the keeper’s lascivious offer. Somehow he had crept close to us. Now he spoke to Rory in an undertone. “I seen her looking at you, fella. Fancies you, she does. Now, I don’t usually do this, but-” And here he looked from side to side as if fearful of being overheard. “I could ’range for you to see her. Alone. Or maybe with a friend or two, long as there’s no rough stuff. She’s a beauty, and I got to keep her that way.”
“What?” Rory asked blankly.
“You know what you want, fella. Here’s how it works. You give me the money now, so we know you’re the one. Then you come back, round midnight when the crowds are less. I’ll take you to her. All she’ll want from you is your ’baccy. Specks do love ’baccy something fierce. She’ll probably do anything you want. Anything. And yer friends can watch, you want ’em to.”
“That’s disgusting,” Oron said. “She’s a savage.”
The keeper shrugged and brushed at his striped shirt. “Maybe so, fella. But some men, they like a woman a bit on the wild side. Give you a ride you won’t never forget. Not an ounce of shame in that one, there isn’t.”