Free Samurai and Other Stories by William Meikle

good Scots blood in you. I can make that blood sing for you. I can bring you home.”  
    He drew something from the folds of his coat. All of us present could instantly recognize it—a fiddle, nut brown and faded with great age. A second movement produced a long stringed bow.
    The Scotsman took hold of the instrument and raised it to his neck. Before starting he looked out over us. The small crowd went quiet. When he spoke, it was barely more than a whisper, but it carried to each of us, as clearly as if he were a preacher on the pulpit.
    “Breathes there the man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said, this is my own, my native land?”
    He started to play. I was expecting Leather Britches or Wind and Rain . What I got was something else entirely. I did not find out until later that each and every person present shared my experience.
    His bow moved across the strings, setting up a drone—and beneath us the old rocks sang in recognition. As his tune began, the stones started to dance. I felt it first through the soles of my feet, but soon my whole frame shook, vibrating in time with his rhythm. My head swam, and it seemed as if the very walls of the town buildings melted and ran. The wagon receded into a great distance until it was little more than a pinpoint of light in a blanket of darkness, and I was alone, in a vast cathedral of emptiness where nothing existed save the dark and the dance from the fiddle.  
    Shapes moved in the dark, wispy shadows with no substance, shadows that capered and whirled as the dance grew ever more frenetic. I smelled fresh flowers, and was buffeted, as if by a strong, surging wind, but as the beat grew ever stronger I cared little. I gave myself to it, lost in the dance, lost in the dark.  
    I know not how long I wandered, there in the space between. I forgot myself, forgot my friends, in a place where only the dance mattered.  
    I have never felt more complete.
    When the dance stopped it was as if my heart had been torn from its root and I felt bereft, felt the loss as keenly as I had the death of my mother three years before. Tears coursed down my cheeks. As I wiped them away I heard sobbing from the women nearby.
    I blinked and looked to the wagon—but it was no longer in front of us. A large tent that hadn’t been there before was pitched beside the church. The Scotsman stood at the entrance in front of a chalkboard. It read: For one night only. Entry 25c. There was no explanation as to what we might be paying for, but I knew that we would all be there that evening.
    And evening was closer than we thought. The morning shift was already making its way up out of the mine, faces and hands grey with grime, eyes deep set in their skulls with long ingrained tiredness. They found a crowd of townsfolk looking around in bewilderment.  
    We had been gone for nearly two hours.
    That fact alone was enough to queer Malone the mine owner against the newcomer—six men were late for the afternoon shift and Malone docked them a whole day’s pay. I do believe the Irishman might have tried to ban us all from attending that night’s show for fear that it might disrupt the next morning’s work. But, powerful as he was, and tight as his grip was on the town, the pull of that fiddle was stronger still. By the time we gathered in front of the tent at sundown we were all present—not just those who had heard the Scotsman play, but everyone else in the town as well. They had seen the effect on the rest of us, and even Malone was there, standing across the street and observing proceedings with a critical eye.
    A box had been provided to collect our money at the entrance and we shuffled in. The tent somehow seemed much larger inside than its exterior suggested. Rows of pews, like church seats, sat in front of a small raised stage. I did have a fleeting thought that there was no possible way all of this had come up the hill in the wagon we had seen, but all other thoughts were secondary to the