“Yes, boy,” his voice a dry drumbeat.

“Stranger, what do you see?”

But one night, I thought he hadn’t heard. I was squatting beside him. He lay in the dark among the outer circle of watchers, among the children and the cripples. Although it was a frozen night, he wore only a cloth shirt, heavily embroidered, open at the neck, his chest hair like a blanket, I hoped. The liquor numbs your senses, I know now. He was very drunk. My face, so close to his, ignited nothing. I saw nothing in the mirror of his face. Fascinated, I stuck my hand in front of his nose. Nothing. His mouth sagged, and I could smell his ruined teeth.

In the silence behind me, in a circle of torchlight, my sister started to dance. She was new to it, and nervous, her gift just large enough to hide her nervousness. And she danced passionately, as if she were looking to deny what we all knew, that she had not yet heard the song of her own self, that her movements were stolen, mixtures of copies, and she was too young and hot to be anything but formless, anything but molten in her heart’s core. She danced, and from time to time in her flashing hands and feet an older dancer in the hall might catch the flicker of something as personal to him as his own body, performed with a dextrousness that he, perhaps, no longer had. This was why old and younger dancers were able to summon up the pride necessary to perform. Their greenness or their dryness gave their work a tension missing from more perfect work, the tension of their bodies and their spirit in unequal struggle. And when later we would watch a dancer in full flower, his death would dance around him as he danced.

I saw this without looking, but the barbarian stared and stared. My sister raised her naked arms. What did he see? I had heard wonders of drunkenness, stories of hallucinations, burning fires, men turned into beasts, whispers to thunder. I had seen a woman so in love with death that she had cut her foot off and died of the wound, not allowing the biters to come near. But this man didn’t look at me. Impatient, I stuck my fingers into his face, poking his uneven cheek. He jerked his head away.

Behind me, a musician had begun to play. She had built a new instrument, a kind of guitar that I had never seen before. Envious, I turned to listen, but she had just started when the barbarian got up and stumbled forward under the lamps. Ignoring me, he pushed his way into the center of the hall. My sister crouched over her guitar. The barbarian covered her shoulder with his hairy fingers, and she looked up at him and smiled. The rest of us were too surprised to move, though some of my brothers and sisters were violent and loved bullying. Others had not forgiven him for having brought his camera into the hall one night, or for having tried to sketch them. But most of us were free from that, and we would have been happy to hear him out. And I especially, for some reason, I felt my heart beating as I watched him in the torchlight, leaning on my sister’s shoulder, closing his drunken eyes. And when he started to sing, I was caught by a kind of sound that I had never heard before, the uncouth melody, the words like vomiting.