ought to have been funny. That music and the seriousness of the cloaked man allied to the symbolic offering of the bright head to the blunt teeth of the goat. Certainly the plump woman nearest Daniel gave a bark of muffled laughter and a young man with a shaven head and ripped T-shirt giggled wildly, hitting his leg and rocking back and forth. But Daniel found that he was not able to laugh or even to smile.
The goat was led away, and the violin music swelled as the man opened the case, unfolding its sides. Gypsy music. Daniel’s father had loved classical music, but had said that most of it was like beauty prowling in a cage. This was wild music and Daniel felt a sudden sharp ache that his father would never hear it.
The spotlight split and the music stopped abruptly.
For a long, straining moment, all that could be heard was the wind and the flapping of the tent walls and roof. Daniel saw that the opened case had become a red velvet table upon which lay gleaming rows of daggers.
A pale, strikingly lovely, dark-haired woman clad in a skin-coloured body suit stepped through the slit in the tent into the light. Instead of looking naked, the skin suit made her look like a sexless doll. The boy came darting out after her to fasten about her slender waist the flexible frame of a crinoline, which reached the ground, caging her lower body and legs.
A movement drew Daniel’s gaze to the fox magician. He took up one of the daggers, kissed the blade and raised it over his head, looking all the while at the woman who lifted her arm, a slender pale stalk. The gypsy violinist began to play a swift, staggering tune until, without warning, the man threw the dagger straight at the woman. Even as people in the audience cried out in shock and alarm, the dagger exploded into feathers and suddenly it was a bird fluttering to her uplifted hand. A white dove.
The audience applauded in relief and delight as the woman lowered her arm. The bird hopped from her fingers into one of the gridded squares of the crinoline and began preening itself. She lifted her arm again. The music played and another dagger flew and was transformed into feathers and beak and bird. The music quickened and slowed and dipped and wailed as dagger after dagger flew, unerring and deadly, from man to woman, always to transform into doves until her lower body was hidden in a dress of living birds. It was an extraordinary sight, but the music went on, striving ever higher, and the birds began to land on the woman’s torso and on her slender shoulders and along her arms, which she now held out on either side of her at shoulder height. There must be a net over the body suit, Daniel guessed. The doves flew to her head, too, but their grasp on the silky braids was less secure and occasionally one of the birds slipped and had to claw its way back into place. Daniel noticed a small streak of red on the woman’s forehead. He told himself it was only a scratch, a minor accident in a masterly act and nothing more, but there was something in the way the woman stood, the defencelessness of her, the seeming nakedness and the way she offered herself to the man and his daggers, that troubled him.
It had taken only a few moments, his senses told him, but Daniel was sweating hard, as if the performance had lasted an hour. There were more birds and more scratches. None were serious, but the blood on her white skin was very vivid. There was a cruel beauty in the spectacle and the possibility that a knife might not become a dove in time or that the doves were daggers after all. That possibility was provoked by the tiny smears of blood. He was repelled by the thought that the blood should be part of the act. For some reason he found himself remembering the two Murri men engaged in their silent deadly fight, and the savage beauty of their desperate and hopeless desire for a woman who wanted neither of them. The beauty, he thought now, came from the hopelessness; the fact that both had known the fight would make no difference.
Watching the dress of living feathers thicken, he wondered suddenly what his father would say of the performance. But for