Free Welcome to Bordertown by Ellen Kushner, Holly Black (editors) Page A

music, exactly. Not what I call music. It’s more like a moaning kind of sound, like wind in a cave, like a woman in the throes of passion, and I can
feel
that note as well as hear it. It rises, rises … turns from a moan into a groan like boulders shifting deep inside the earth … or a groan of pain, deep inside my own belly, aching and awful and endless. I catch my breath, and all around the club I can hear other people gasping, too—but this, this is
my
pain; this is
my
grief. It’s Trish disappearing and the folks growing old too fast and a dozen other deeply private things … and yet it is also
everybody’s
pain, every person there, shared and multiplied, unbearable … and then suddenly it breaks, like a wave … like window glass shattering into shards of sound and light, and themoaning is now the wind in the trees, and I’ve never felt so free in all my life.
    Then a fiddle appears in the skinny human’s hands, its music sliding sideways into the web of sound, of light, of motion and emotion that Spider has been making, conjuring, weaving with his body, his breath, the lightning movements of that overlong bow. The fiddle music, by contrast, sounds almost coarse; it is human, earthy, raw … and powerful due to all those things. It is a sound that my ears can more easily understand as
music
, and it anchors the elfin sounds and draws them closer to the human sphere. Then there are drums. Maybe two, or five, or ten. Or is it dozens, stationed all around the room? Or maybe it’s just one young woman, dark hands a blur of motion, making all that sound. Next, a flute, or something like a flute, making … 
noises
(not unpleasant, just strange) that I have no words to properly describe. Followed by an instrument that looks a lot like a mandolin, and sounds like one, too.
    Overhead the birds add their song to the tapestry of sound and flit through the spectral trees, and I know they’re made of a mishmash of magic and mechanics, but they look so goddamn
real.
An illusionary wind rustles my hair, and there are tears in my eyes. I don’t know why. I don’t even know if I
like
this music—it’s too strange, too hard, too sad, too full of longing for something that I can’t even name. But I’m rooted to the spot. And then suddenly the tall kid shouts, and it all changes.
    Electric guitars appear onstage, corralling all the other sounds into a danceable beat that is wild and insistent. These are rhythms I know; this is good ol’ rock and roll—so loud, so raucous, and so damn good that all of the kids in the club are now on their feet and they’re shouting, too. Shouting, stomping, clapping, jumping up and down, and dancing. Oh my god, are we dancing, so fast andhard that the floor starts to shake. Okay, I’ve never been much of a dancer—I’m a shuffle-from-one-foot-to-the-other kind of guy—but this music is so good (weird as anything, but good) that I have to move, have to shake it up inside me, and if I look demented, I just don’t care. For the next two hours, I forget about Trish and my folks and every other thing on this earth, and I live only in that music, in sweat and motion, in that heaving crowd of kids. Trish used to say that dancing can be a sacred thing, and I think that I now know what she meant. Something happens when you share that high, that joy, with a room full of equally blissed-out strangers. You change, they change, and by evening’s end, no one is quite such a stranger anymore. We roar and stomp, and when the set comes to its close, we will not let the band off the stage. They’re back for encore after encore, and I dance and shout and do not want the night to end.
    Eventually, however, the last notes of the fiddle fade and the birds overhead grow still. The club grows quiet; people whisper or they leave in silence. No one wants to break the spell. I find my coat, my tool bag, and my sleepy dog. My legs are sore but I am feeling … lighter. I find myself smiling