“Tonight, we dance. Right now. The People dance the Dust Dance. For you all. Come close, come close. See us dance. Only one time! Watch it now.” She beckoned us, waving her arms to urge us closer.

Beside the cage, the keeper’s jaw dropped open. “What’s this, what’s this?” he demanded angrily, but the Specks were no longer paying him any attention. He seized the chain that secured the door to their enclosure and rattled it threateningly, as if he were coming in. Beggar looked over his shoulder at the keeper, and then ignored him as the three males trooped back toward their shelter. The girl positioned herself in the middle of their cage, well out of reach of the keeper’s prod. Now she lifted her voice and her arms. Her clear tones rang out. “Dust Dance! Dust Dance! Gather all for the Dust Dance! You never to see this before! You never to see this again! Come one. Come all. Dust Dance of the People!”

Her tone was a fair imitation of the barkers’ outside. My estimation of her innate intelligence rose. As a man, we all pressed closer to the cage, even as the keeper warned us sternly, “Keep back! Keep back! Do not touch the bars!” When we all ignored him he raised his own voice and began shouting, “The Dust Dance of the savage Specks of the far east! Gather one, gather all. Only five tallies more to witness the Dust Dance. A mere five tallies to watch what you’ll never see again!”

But his efforts to profit went mostly ignored. A few fools dug into their pockets and counted money out to him, which he promptly stuffed into his own greasy purse. Inside the cage, the woman continued to cry her appeal for spectators while the males huddled inside their shelter. In a remarkably short time, they emerged ‘dressed’ for the dance. Feathers, dead leaves, bits of fur, tassels of shells and a pouch were suspended from strings tied round their waists. Their matted hair had been hastily plaited into queues down their backs. Long earrings of cheap beads dangled almost to their shoulders. I sensed items hoarded for a long time, perhaps in great hardship.

Their keeper had turned barker. “Never before seen in a city! Never before performed under a tent! The Dust Dance of the savage Specks. Ladies and lords, come now, come now, to see the—”

His voice was suddenly drowned out by an ululation from the Speck woman. Before her cry died out, the Speck men took it up, and modulating it to a deep-voiced chanting. They spaced their voices, like children singing a round, producing a strange, echoing sound. Slowly, feet shuffling, they began to circle the woman. She stood, her arms uplifted like a tree’s branches, and swayed in place as she sang in a pure, sweet soprano. It did not matter that we did not speak the language. I could hear the wind blowing and rain dripping from leaves in her song. The men circled her slowly, once, then twice. The crowd drew closer to the cage, transfixed by the strange dance and odd song. Each of the men dipped a hand into his pouch and drew forth a handful of fine, dark dust. They began to shake their hands over their heads as they danced around the woman. The dust leaked from between their fingers to float free in the air around them. The woman’s voice suddenly rose in a long note that she held for an impossibly long time. Again the men circled her, dancing in close and then out in a larger circle. Again, they dipped their hands into their pouches and shook the dust free in the air as they danced. The woman swayed like a tree in the wind, and the crowd oohed in awe as a ghostly wind shushed through the tent in seeming harmony with the dance. It carried the floating dust over the crowd and several people sneezed, raising brief flurries of laughter from those around them.

The dance went on and on. Long after I had wearied of it, I was trapped there. The crowd behind us pressed us close to the cage bars. Rory especially seemed enraptured by the woman and her song. He gripped the bars with both hands and hung on, as if he were the one imprisoned by her wildness. I saw the keeper look at him twice, and feared the man would come to bang his knuckles but the press of the mob trapped the man as effectively as it did us.

The woman’s song and the men’s chanting built to a crescendo. Their shuffling dance became a swift walk, then a jog, and suddenly they were running round the edges of the cage, even the old man, even the limping Speck, and they flung their dust in handfuls that drifted out over the crowd. People suddenly cried out as the dust stung their eyes. Coughing and sneezing, I turned my head away from the dance and tried to push my way back into the gathered folk, to no avail. The dust I had inhaled burned in the back of my throat and left a fetid taste in my mouth. The keeper was shrieking at the Specks to stop, stop! And suddenly they did.

Without a glance at their keeper, all of them gathered silently in the middle of their enclosure. The men upended their little dust bags and shook them, but nothing fell out. The woman stood in their midst and briefly set a hand on top of each of their heads, almost like a benediction. Then they turned, and with no acknowledgment to the crowd at all, nor to the rain of coins that were showering onto the straw, they retreated to their crude shelter and huddled there, showing us only their striped backs. Their heads bent together as they conferred about something.

Almost immediately the crowd began to break up, but it was some moments before we could move away from our spot. “I never saw anything like that before,” Trist said. He knuckled at his eyes, reddened where the dust had hit them. I turned a little aside from my fellows and spat several times, trying to clear the foul taste from my mouth. I wiped my mouth with my handkerchief, and almost immediately had a violent sneezing fit. Around me, other people were coughing.

Rory clung to the bars still, “She is, well, she is somethin’,” Rory agreed. His mouth hung slightly ajar as he stared at the woman huddling in the shadows of the crate.

“You want her?”

We all turned, startled by the keeper’s lascivious offer. Somehow he had crept close to us. Now he spoke to Rory in an undertone. “I seen her looking at you, fella. Fancies you, she does. Now, I don’t usually do this, but—” And here he looked from side to side as if fearful of being overhead. “I could ’range for you to see her. Alone. Or maybe with a friend or two, long as there’s no rough stuff. She’s a beauty, and I got to keep her that way.”

“What?” Rory asked blankly.

“You know what you want, fella. Here’s how it works. You give me the money now, so we know you’re the one. Then you come back, around midnight when the crowds are less. I’ll take you to her. All she’ll want from you is your baccy. Specks do love baccy, something fierce. She’ll probably do anything you want. Anything. And yer friends can watch, you want ’em to.”

“That’s disgusting,” Oron said. “She’s a savage.”

The keeper shrugged and brushed at his striped shirt. “Maybe so, fella. But some men, they like a woman a bit on the wild side. Give you a ride you won’t never forget. Not an ounce of shame in that one, there isn’t.”

“Don’t do it,” I said quietly to Rory. “She’s not what she seems.” I could not have explained my foreboding.

He jumped as if I had poked him, and looked startled to find me there. He had been so completely focused on the keeper’s base offer. “Well, course not, Nevare. What sorta fool do you take me for?”

The keeper laughed, low. “Listen to him, you’ll be the fool that missed the chance of a lifetime, young feller. Do it now, while yer young, and the memory will keep you warm even when yer old.”

“Let’s get away from here,” Oron said. He didn’t seem to care that he sounded prissy. I was just glad that he had said it, instead of me. We all began to turn away.

“Come back later, without your friends!” the keeper called out after us as we pushed our way through the crowd. “You can tell ’em later what they missed.”