"Calinda, calinda!" called out someone. "Dance the calinda! Badoum, badoum!"

It was nothing like Rossini, nothing like Schubert. Nothing that had to do with Herr Kovald or Paris at all.

Already, men and women had begun to dance.

Leaning against the iron palings of the fence, hands in his pockets and uneasy shame in his heart, January searched the crowd.

The woman he was looking for he hadn't seen in sixteen years.

Dark faces under bright tignons, white smiles gleaming. Shabby skirts swirling, moving, breasts swaying under white blouses, arms weaving. A smell of sweat came off the crowd, and with it the memory of nearly forgotten nights sitting on the step of his mother's cabin, watching the other slaves dance by the smoky blaze of pine knots. Considering how much there had been to do on Bellefleur, the endless weeding and chopping at the heavy cane, repairing barns and outbuildings, cutting cypress, digging mud for levees and causeways, he still wondered how any of them had had the energy to dance, how he himself had managed, even with the wild energy of a child.

More and more were joining in, though, even as they had then. People were shouting, singing, wild and pagan and utterly unlike the music he had been trained to make. Tunes and fragments of tunes unwound like dizzy pinwheels, reeling off into space. A thin girl with a red tignon coiled high like a many-knotted turban danced near him, teasing and inviting, and the brass rattles she wore on her ankles clattered in alien music. He grinned, shook his head. She flashed him a glimpse of calf and petticoat and spun on her way. Across the crowd a face seemed to emerge, half familiar-he realized with a shock it was Romulus Valle, and looked quickly away.

How many others were here? he wondered in momentary panic. Bella-would Bella come here on her Sunday afternoons? His mother's cook? He realized he didn't even know if she was still a slave, or had been freed. It had never occurred to him to ask. She was part of his mother's household from time immemorial... In either case she'd never let him hear the end of this if she saw him.

He wondered suddenly if the girl Judith would be here, and what he could possibly say to her about the thing he carried in his pocket.

"Her-on mandt, Her-on mande, Ti-gui li papa!"

Thin, whining, almost hypnotic, the voices rose from deeper in the crowd. More and more were dancing, to the counterpoint rhythm of the drums, the sweet, metallic jangle of ankle clappers. January's mind groped at the meaning of the words, but they were as much African as French-and bad French at that.

"Her-on mandt,

Ti-gui li papa!

Her-on mande,

Her-on mande,

Do-se dan do-go!"

Other voices rose up, only slightly more comprehensible:

"They seek to frighten me,

Those people must be crazy.

They don't see their misfortune

Or else they must be drunk.

"I, the Voodoo queen,

With my lovely handkerchief

Am not afraid of tomcat shrieks-

I drink serpent venom!"

Someone shouted, "Marie! Marie!" Turning his head, January saw that a woman had mounted a sort of platform made of packing boxes in the center of the square. She was tall and would have topped many in the crowd even had she not been standing on the makeshift dais- handsome rather than beautiful, with strong cheekbones and very dark eyes. Gold earrings flashed in the torrent of black hair that streamed on her shoulders, and jewels- possibly glass and possibly real-glittered on her white blouse and tempestuous blue skirt. Even without moving her feet she was dancing, body rippling snakelike, eyes closed in a kind of curious ecstasy, though her face was impassive in the long, brazen light.

" I walk on pins,

I walk on needles,

I walk on gilded splinters,

I want to see what they can do..."

Other voices were shouting, "Zombi! Papa Limba!" and January's eyes passed quickly across the faces of those who crowded near. The woman had a snake in her arms, the biggest king snake he had ever seen, six feet long and thick as a man's wrist. It coiled around her neck and over her shoulders as she danced, and the droning voices rose against the driving heartbeat of the drums. Through the pickets around the square he could see white faces looking in, women in simple calicoes or the fancier twills and silks, men in the coarse clothing of laborers or the frock coats of artisans or merchants. At the square's four gates, policemen looked on impassively.

How could they? January wondered. How could they simply watch? Did they not feel what these people felt, what he himself felt against his will? The music was electric, drawing the mind and body to it with a force beyond that of childhood memory. It drew at the blood, and even from here, halfway across the square, he could sense the power of the woman with the snake.

He moved nearer. Few of the dancers seemed to notice him, the men dancing first with one woman, then with another, others leaping, shaking, twisting on their own. Looking up at the woman's face, he

wondered if she was aware of the crowd around her, or, if not, what it was that she saw and heard and felt. The snake moved its head, tongue flicking, and January stepped back. Irrational fear brushed him, that the woman would look down at him with those huge black eyes and say, You are not one of us... You are here to spy.

And close by the platform of boxes-marked BRODERICK AND SONS-among the dancers, he saw the woman he was looking for, the woman he had come to this place to find.

She was dancing alone, like the woman on the platform. There were far more women than men around the boxes and many of them moved, eyes shut, in solitary ecstasy. She was thinner than he remembered and her pointy-chinned, flat-boned face was lined. Her clothing, and the orange-and-black tignon that covered her hair, was faded and old. Above the low neck of her calico blouse he could see the points of her collarbone, the beginnings of crepy wrinkles in her neck, and the sight of it went to his heart.

He dared not go up to her, dared not speak. He doubted, in her present state, she would hear him. But the memories were like vinegar, honey, and salt.

"Oh yes, yes, Mamzelle Marie, She knows well the Grand Zombi..."

The woman with the snake stepped down. Eyes open, black as coal, she stretched forth her hands, clasping the hands of the dancers who crowded close. Sometimes she spoke, a low guttural voice January could not hear. Now and then a woman would curtsy to her or a man would kiss her hands. The thin black woman came forward, clasped the voodooienne's hands, and their eyes met, smiling with curious kinship. The two women embraced, and the one they called Marie kissed the other's cheek.

Under the trees someone set up a pot of gumbo, the smell of it thin and smoky in the air. On a packing box a man piled yesterday's bread, and a praliniere stood by with her cart. Men and women gathered around, talking softly and laughing together, then going back into the dancing, as January knew they would be doing all afternoon. But the thin woman turned and walked toward the gate of the square, her patched skirts swishing in the weeds.

She passed between the policemen there, crossed Rue des Ramparts and vanished between the buildings on the corner of Rue Saint Louis. January followed her, angling sideways to pass through the crowd of whites gathered outside the palings. He dodged a carriage and a couple of cabs on the broad street, leaped the gutter, and stepped quickly along the banquette through the shadows that were already growing long.

The attack, when it came, took him completely by surprise. His mind was focused on the woman in the orange-and-black tignon, not only seeking her-pausing at the corner of Rue Burgundy to look for her-but wondering what he would say to her when he came up with her. Wondering if she would recognize him. Or, if she did, whether she would admit to it, and if she admitted to it, whether she would speak to him or simply walk away. He had not been able to locate her before leaving New Orleans, so their last meeting had been an awkward commonplace, with angry words and bitter prophecies of ill on both their parts.