The Dancers of Noyo by Margaret St. Clair Read Free Book Online Page A

But I was getting awfully sleepy. Sleepy-bye, sleepby - pye -bye. The surf below me was a gorgeous changing aquamarine. Rocked in the cradle of the perfectly beautiful deep. Then I passed out.
     
                  I must have slept for quite a long time. The moon was well over in the western part of the sky when I sat up. I felt weak and nauseated, and my clothing was dank with dew and sweat. But I was Sam McGregor, indubitably Sam. Alvin and Alice had gone with the wind, leaving, I felt, no traces. There was an almost beatific quality in being Sam.
     
                  All the same, I wanted to find a place where I could make a fire and bake the chill out of my bones. I ached all over. After all, I had spent a lot of time in the past twelve hours being stationary beside Highway One.
     
                  I got up and hobbled over to the railing on the seaward side. No, the descent to the water was too steep here. I'd have to go farther on.
     
                  Did everybody who took the Grail Tourney have my experiences? I wondered as I began my creaky plodding once more. My "mother" had said that nobody ever seemed improved by the journey; suddenly I realized that none of the Mandarins had ever gone on it themselves. And yet they were insistent about the desirability of the journey for their juniors, a journey from which nobody returned unchanged. Was it—did they—
     
                  It was a messy supposition. But were the Mandarins and the Dancers accomplices in a silent conspiracy, not quite conscious to the Mandarins, to keep the rising generation dependent, weak-minded, confused? The Mandarins wouldn't be the first generation in history that, despite its youthful rebelliousness, had wanted to hold on to status and power. An insignificant status, a feeble power. But, status and power.
     
                  My joints were loosening up. I was walking faster. I longed to get to some place where I could rest for what remained of the night. I would have liked to fly or run.
     
                  Run? Fly? But I was really dancing, moving along the road with the hard, stamping step of the Noyo dancers. I'd been dancing for several minutes now.
     
                  As soon as I realized what I had been doing, I stopped myself. I could stop; this wasn't the beginning of another extra-life. But I was conscious of a quiet, constant push in myself toward dancing. It made me feel a little foolish, a little ashamed. And a little afraid.
     
    -
     

Chapter V
     
                  Gift-of-God was feeling carefully over my chest with her chapped, scratchy little hands. The action purported to be a caress, but I had my doubts, and the doubts became certainty when she gave a surreptitious tug at the string of my medicine bag. I had known she was up to something.
     
                  I lay on my back, staring up at the roof of the sweat-house and trying to think. I had got to Russian Gulch a couple of days ago, and the tribe—it had a bad reputation—had been almost pressingly hospitable. I'd been glad to lie around resting for the first day. I was still suffering from the peculiar fatigue that had afflicted me ever since I started down Highway One, and my mind was confused. But I'd been ready to go on my way for the past twelve hours, and the tribe had thought up one excuse after another to detain me. Gee-Gee's was only the last of a considerable series.
     
                  Abruptly I sat up, throwing Gee-Gee to one side. "Why'd you bring me here?" I asked.
     
                  " Tho you could have the Grail Vision, Tham ," she answered, all wide-eyed innocence. Sometimes her conversation was as witless as a five-year- old's and sometimes as knowing as that of a teenager on the edge of voting age. Actually, she was an unpleasant, pitiful little girl of eleven or twelve.