the first time in his life, Daniel found he could not summon up the older man’s face. The conjuring of doves began to seem endless to Daniel, and yet there was no monotony in it. He would have to be a monster to be bored by something so horribly beautiful.
Outside the tent, the wind was howling, and the roof billowed and heaved in convulsive shudders. There were more than a hundred doves on the woman now, and the weight of the crinoline must have been considerable. Yet she did not buckle or show any sign of strain. The doves gradually covered her arms and her neck and hair until only her face was visible.
The violin changed and the last dagger flew straight at her face, became a final dove that landed there somehow, obscuring her. Daniel thought of claws sinking into white skin, gouging, finding purchase, and he started to his feet, but before he could cry out, the music abruptly ceased. He froze and for a moment there was only the sound of the wind. Everything was in motion – the tent, the air, the shifting, jostling doves. The only fixed point was the black-clad magician with his glimmering foxtail of hair, and so all eyes fixed on him, the eye of the storm.
Slowly his hands lifted until he stood as the woman had stood, mirroring the shuddering, dove-covered mass, and then the doves rose up in a churning coil of feathers, swirling and widening at the top until they formed a spinning funnel, a white whirlwind. Then they exploded outward, and in their midst there was only a falling drift of feathers gleaming in the lights.
The woman had vanished.
The bright lights blinked off as suddenly as the music had stopped, plunging the tent into darkness, then two lanterns were hung, one either side of the entrance which was now, perforce, an exit. After a few forlorn claps, people began to rise and make their way outside. The sudden end of the show had left Daniel feeling off-balance and he remained seated to gather himself. His heart was pounding even as he told himself that it had all been a trick of some kind. But he did not believe it. The blood had been real. He was sure of it. The boy who had brought him to the circus came to sit beside him.
‘You like?’ he asked, grinning, but his eyes were serious. It was as if the two of them had made a bargain and he was checking the details of their agreement.
‘Why does she let him hurt her . . .’ Daniel began, and then stopped, not sure what he meant to ask.
‘That is what is always being asked,’ the boy interrupted gleefully and ambiguously. ‘You ask her. Maybe she will answer. You want?’
Daniel realised the boy was offering to bring him to the woman, and found himself nodding. The boy beamed and rose and Daniel did the same. His body ached the way it sometimes did after days of riding. They made their way through the seats and he stumbled a little in the near darkness, for his eyes would not adjust. The pale woman in her dove dress seemed to have imprinted her image on his retina, so that whenever he blinked, he saw her pallid form.
The boy preceded him to one of the exits but instead of leading Daniel outside, he lifted a flap in the blind end of the cloth corridor to reveal a long, narrow chamber furnished with a low table, two battered kitchen chairs and a worn couch. Daniel let himself be ushered through the flap into unexpected warmth. Left alone, he turned to examine the chamber. A half-drunk bottle of red wine stood on the floor, glowing red in the light of a lantern suspended over the table from an old dressing-gown cord. A plastic fast-food container on the table was half filled with cigarette butts and the air smelled of old ash and fumes from a kerosene heater. Daniel was about to sit when a flap at the other end of the space opened and the fox-haired magician entered. He had stripped off his cape and wore dark jeans and a crumpled open-necked blue shirt, the sleeves rolled up to reveal strong forearms and sinewy wrists covered in the same wiry red hairs that showed at his throat.
‘You want woman. Sit and we discuss,’ he commanded in guttural English.
Belatedly it occurred to Daniel that he had misunderstood what the