Then she moved away, and a figure stepped out from behind her. This was a man, dark-skinned, and naked, too. The shoulders were as straight as mine, but broader under the red cloak fastened around his neck; tiles of muscle marked out the chest, and were blurred under the thin pelt of curled black hair. He had no distinct waist; his body narrowed from the chest to the hips, tapering and pared as a knife blade, and the hair grew over it, thinning to a stripe over his belly and widening again at the groin. His penis hung relaxed in the black brush of it, limp and wobbling. His legs were black-haired and bony-kneed. I couldn’t imagine walking in that body. I couldn’t imagine walking in hers.

I had seen them both somewhere before. Where… ah. Stylized, on the walls of China Black’s hounfor.

He also took my hands and drew me close, and kissed me on the lips. Then the picture jumped, as if someone had cut out too many frames in the splice. He closed one large milk-white hand around my neck until I couldn’t swallow, until my breath sounded like a saw going through a board, and slammed me back against the wall. And Beano said, “Nothing’s free… ” And though I didn’t really feel any pain, that was the second time I wanted to wake up, and much more urgently than the first.

Continuity, even by dream-logic, broke, as if the projectionist had started the wrong reel. I was in one of the vegetable gardens, alone, wrapped in a perfect silence that never really happened in the fields. The row at my feet was half-weeded. I knelt and went back to work. Reach, pull, toss. Reach, pull, toss. It had a rhythm. It had a sound, a series of sounds — and I began to hear the drums, somewhere distant, speaking to the motion of my arm.

I stood up (as I did it, I heard that, too, allowed for in the drumbeat) and started walking toward the town circle. It was full dark when I reached it, but the torches, the lanterns, the bonfire, broke the darkness up into pleasing sections. The drummers were in an arc of the circle by themselves, playing fiercely, the big drums between their knees, the smaller ones propped on their thighs. The rest of the circle was clapping and swaying, and singing responses to one strong voice whose owner I couldn’t see. I slid through a gap and stood inside the ring.

The dancers were in the center, stamping, tossing their heads, working their shoulders. The strong voice, I found, was Sherrea’s, singing in a language I didn’t know. And I knew so many. The ring of onlookers had receded behind me; I was surrounded by dancers now. None of them touched me, but none had to. The force of their movements, and the rhythm they moved to, were like an assault.

I felt the rhythm pulling at my muscles. I felt my head yanked back and my spine arched as if someone had hooked my breastbone and was pulling it up on a rope. My legs were weak and weren’t answering my brain. And in all the split places of my skin, in the blood running its closed path beneath, in the straight, hard bones of my arms and legs and in the bone cask of my rib cage, the wasp-eggs of the beat were hatching out.