She is
between the earth
and the sky.
The drums roll endlessly through the low hollow of the earth.
She stands
for the people
and their place.
Hiri waits.
Everything she sees is very sharp and small. The last food she had was two days ago, on the evening she arrived here, in this place, this sacred place. Three days of walking beneath the sky, three nights of sleeping on the earth, made her ready. She rose the next morning and began to prepare.
See her
she is dancing
on the edge of the world.
For two days she has been sweeping the dancing ground, mixing the mud, chipping flakes of flint to make the knife. She coated her body with mud, pouring handfuls of it over her head until her hair was plastered back with it, until there is not the slightest fleck of her skin that shows brown through the pale grey mud. All the while she chewed the dulai leaf, and now her lips and tongue and throat are slightly numb and tingle.
Watch her
dancing.
Watch her!
Back in the city, Hiri knows that the dulai leaf has mildly narcotic properties, that it contains a compound used in pain medication. Back in the city she thinks of the people here today as the Salaajo Clan.
She is dancing
beneath the sky.
Here, she has no words except those spoken by her mother's mother's mother. She chews dulai because it is the dancer's plant. The people around her don't have a name given to them by their neighbours out of the need to diferentiate one group of people from another, salaajo, the grass-burners. They are only the People.
She is dancing
upon the earth.
The other dancers have started. This dance is too important for one dancer, even one older and more experienced than Hiri. The man they are dancing for is very sick. He killed a man, in a fight, when they were both drunk. It will take all their strength to bring him back to the dance.
Between sky and earth
she is dancing
in the wind.
Hiri is neither waiting nor expectant, but when the moment comes, she knows. Without thinking, she moves. The lines of dancers open for her and close around her.
Dancing
on the earth
beneath the sky.
The drums grow louder. They drown out the sound of the dancers' bare feet on the bare earth, but Hiri can hear it anyway, hear it through the soles of her feet as they strike the ground in unison with the the other dancers. They are twenty dancers. They are one dance.
In the wind
dancing
below the sky
dancing.
Sweat washes the mud from their bodies, acrid with the dulai they have all been chewing. Dust rises from their pounding feet, clinging to their skin. They look like they have been carved out of the ground, rocks given life, stone, dancing.
Between the people
and their past
stone dancing.
One by one the other dancers whirl to a stop, sink to their knees, panting. The drums fade. Hiri leaps and turns alone, the knife held high. Each circuit brings her closer and closer to the reason they are all here today. The sick man stands still, waiting. He is afraid, Hiri knows. He said so, in the long hours he spent with Hiri and the other shamen as they prepared him for this day. He is afraid, but he wants to be well. Wants, again, to be part of the People and their dance.
After the future
behind the dawn
the dance.
Hiri reaches him, and he meets her gaze. She can see in his face that in this moment they want the same thing: that he be made well, and that he live through the healing.
She takes a deep breath, and raises the knife.
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