Daniel took a seat at one end of the front row of benches as a man in a black cloak lined in gold silk stepped through the slit onto the sandy stage. His long, thick, red-brown hair was drawn tightly into a tail that hung down his back like the brush of a fox. His face was narrow and his teeth flashed white with a hint of gold as he bowed gracefully. The boy who had shown Daniel to the circus pushed through the slit after him, wheeling a glittering gold casket as big as a fridge on wheels. A magician, Daniel thought, as the boy withdrew, and he set himself to watch for sleight of hand.
Cymbals crashed and another boy appeared, so like the first as to be a younger brother, leading a small white goat. There was a burst of violin music and the fox magician began to speak. His words were foreign and incomprehensible to Daniel, but it was clear from his movements that he was describing his prowess as a tamer of the most ferocious sorts of beasts. Then, very slowly and theatrically, he opened the mouth of the goat and pushed the top of his head gently against its teeth.
It 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 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 al
one, 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 boy had been suggesting. He had been an idiot. ‘I am sorry, I think there has been a mistake,’ he said, beginning to rise.
‘No mistake, you come to Paris for a woman,’ said the fox man, narrowing his eyes.
‘No . . . Yes, but to see a specific woman. I have arranged to meet her,’ Daniel stammered, hoping the man would not ask her name.
‘Arranging with me for time with Dove Princess,’ said the fox magician.
Daniel rarely lost his temper and now, feeling it stir, he realised how much he had disliked the performance, how much he disliked this man. The realisation calmed him. ‘I would like to meet your assistant,’ he said evenly. ‘She is very brave.’
‘Assistant,’ mocked the fox magician. Then he sneered and added, ‘She is very beautiful.’
Daniel flushed. Almost he wished the fox magician would attack him so that he could act instead of sitting here tangling up his tongue like a fool. Then he told himself that he was a fool indeed, for whatever was happening here in this strange little circus, it was none of his affair. What was he doing here? He said quietly, ‘Perhaps you can pass on my thanks for the performance.’
The other man shrugged and seemed to relax. ‘You wan’ a wine?’
Daniel hesitated. He wanted to leave but he did not know the words that would release him. He nodded and moved to sit on the couch after the fox man pointed to it and poured wine into two plastic cups he drew out from beneath the table.
‘Where is she?’ Daniel asked, when he took the cup of wine.
‘She vanished.’ The fox magician gave him a sly smile before drinking a mouthful of wine. ‘Is gift she learned in childhood.
Has been ver’ useful.’
‘It was a trick,’ Daniel said slowly, setting down his cup untouched.
The magician put down his cup too and reached out in one smooth gesture to turn Daniel’s hand palm up with a quick strong twist. He stared at it intently. ‘Here is calloused working hand and yet it is hand of child who knows nothing.’ He looked into Daniel’s face, and for a moment the cunning in his expression slipped like a mask that had nearly been dislodged, as he murmured, ‘Nothing more than a child’s pain, perhaps . . . which is far from nothing.’
Suddenly his English was perfect, though accented, and Daniel stared at him, shaken and confused. ‘What is all this? Why does she let you hurt her? She must have been half-smothered at the end.’
‘Art requires pain,’ the fox magician said, but absently, as if his mind were elsewhere. ‘Tell me where have you come from, that you seek audience with the Dove Princess?’
‘I’m Australian,’ Daniel said.
‘Ahh. So. A country of children, I think, full of light and thoughtlessness.’ His eyes now seemed to glitter and Daniel saw that they were a very light soft green. ‘And why did you come here?’
‘I came to meet a woman.’
‘You do not truly wish to meet the Dove Princess,’ said the fox magician, cutting him off. ‘She will bring you nothing that you desire.’ His voice was very soft, very serious.
‘I . . . no,’ Daniel stammered.
The magician seemed not to hear him. ‘You think to rescue her. But she is not my victim. I am hers. All of us are her instruments, the boys, the doves, you. She designed the Dove Game.’
‘The blood is a trick?’ Daniel asked.
‘The blood is real. The pain is real. That is how she wants it. She sculpts her own pain.’
‘But that . . . It’s sick . . .’ Without realising it, he had taken up the cup and now wine slopped over the brim onto his hand.
‘It is monstrous,’ the magician agreed wearily. ‘But the blood is what gives the game its power. You see that? Even you could see that.’
‘But . . . why does she do it? Surely not for money?’
‘She says the Dove Game reminds her of a truth she experienced in the camp.’
Daniel found his mouth was dry. ‘She . . . she was in a concentration camp? But that was decades ago. It’s not possible.’
‘She was a child. Children were taken. Not just Jews. Gypsies also. The chosen people prefer to forget that, of course. She was taken from near here. My grandfather was taken, too. That is how she came to join us after the war. He brought her. He said he owed her his life, for she had stolen food for him that kept him from starving. We come here each year on the day that they were taken. She always sends the boy out for men to come and watch her performance, so that she can choose one.’ His sighed. ‘Her mind is gone, of course. There are brilliant shards left, but not much else. She says that one day a man will come, and she will show him the truth that he revealed to her.’
Daniel thought of a foreign man, dying on a remote outback road, and the pale woman in a dress of living doves, and wondered if it was possible that she was the woman he had been sent to meet. It was too much of a coincidence that he had just happened on the circus, he told himself. But then, he had not just happened on it. The boy had come to find him. He seemed to hear the beating of wings and to feel the full living weight of the doves descending on him, their claws cutting into him.
‘The boy who led me here . . .’
‘A pretty little monkey she feeds and pets and sends running to do her errands. When we are here, I think her madness worsens, and that is why she sends him for men. They want to meet her, of course, after the show. They offer money and we take their money, but she never meets them. None of them is the man she is seeking.’
‘I need to see her,’ Daniel said urgently.
‘I told you . . .’ the magician said.
‘You don’t understand. The man she is looking for is dead. There was an accident and he asked me to come in his place. To meet her as they had agreed.’
‘I suppose it was inevitable that eventually she would summon up a man whose madness matched her own,’ the fox magician said in a resigned voice. He rose in a fluid movement. ‘Go home, boy. The Dove Princess is not for you.’
‘Please, she promised to tell him the truth that she learned . . .’ Daniel said, no longer sure of his motives.
‘No,’ the fox magician said urgently, but he was staring past Daniel.
Daniel felt the air stir behind him. He would have turned but a cool hand descended on the back of his neck, staying the movement. ‘Leave us.’ The woman spoke in English, her voice husky and accented. The magician bowed and withdrew.
The woman spoke again. ‘I have lived only to give back the truth that was given to me.’ Daniel felt a knife at his neck, like the tip of a bird’s claw, as she asked, ‘Do you desire the truth I offer?’
Many things fluttered through Daniel’s mind. The sound of madness in the woman’s voice like the beating of a bird trapped in a chimney; the way his father’s breath had rattled as he died in hospital; the sound of the crow’s call on the day the foreign man died; the way the desert air shimmered and transported visions; the velvet touch of Snowy’s muzzle against his palm. And then, at last, the sight of a woman wearing a dress of doves, who lived for a truth that was pain.
And he grew old with understanding.
He turned towards her, not caring how the edge of the knife slid shallowly into his skin. The woman was very beautiful but much older than she had looked on the stage, her skin w
hite and finely wrinkled. Her large eyes were dark and full of shadows and he wondered if she would see him through them. He felt the dribble of blood on his collarbone and the sting of the air against the tiny wound.
‘He wasn’t in the Resistance, was he?’ he asked. ‘He didn’t betray you. He was one of them, the one that tortured you.’
How still her face became, like a skull. ‘He asked me over and over for the truth. He said he would use pain to teach it to me,’ she rasped. ‘He was an artist of pain. I told him that he would one day long for the truth that he had given me, and that he would have to come to me for it, because no one else could give it to him. I told him to meet me where we met. That I would come on the day we had met, every year, until he returned.’
‘He was coming,’ Daniel said. ‘He had an accident. Before he died he asked me to come in his place. To tell you that you were right.’
‘Who are you to him?’ she asked fiercely. ‘His son? His grandson?’
‘He had no wife, no children, no friends,’ Daniel said. ‘I am no one – a stranger he talked to as he was dying.’
‘I waited for nothing, then,’ the woman said.
‘I came,’ Daniel said.
She laughed hollowly. ‘You want the truth I would have given him?’ she hissed. ‘You do not want that truth, for once you have had it, there is nothing else.’
‘There is nothing else,’ Daniel said, feeling that all his life had been leading him to this moment of perfect clarity and purpose.
The Dove Princess gazed down at him and madness and hope and confusion churned in her lustrous eyes, then there was pity and she said, almost lightly, ‘But you are only a child.’ And swift as a striking bird, she drew the edge of the dagger across her throat. A red mouth widened in a leer as her head fell back.
Daniel heard a scream and knew it was his. He tried to rise, but his legs would not hold him. His head swam and he fell. The world spun and the fox magician appeared in the centre of it, once again the eye of the storm. His mouth moved but Daniel could not hear the words. A dark sea engulfed him.