Free The Age of Magic by Ben Okri

While Lao gazed at Ursa Minor, she wandered on alone, towards the bridge.
    She went soundlessly past the fragrance of honeysuckle. She went into the substance of night, till her own substance was dissolved in it.
    Lao stood there near the woodland, not thinking. He felt himself returning to some primal condition and lost all sense of who he was, or what he was. He was not thinking but listening to intimate whisperings. He was listening to the music of flowers. He felt he had entered an invisible temple that drifts through time. He could feel the earth revolving.
    He was not aware that Mistletoe had gone.

11
    Mistletoe had wandered into her own eternity. In the darkness she found freedom from her body and from endless watching eyes. When she was under the bridge she looked back and saw only the blackness of night but was not afraid. She walked into the marmorial darkness.
    As she passed beneath the darkness of the bridge she passed into her own legendary world. She saw a huge white horse in a field of blue flowers. Then the horse disappeared.
    She came to a field. In the middle of the field was a circus. The music of pipes and strings and drums pervaded the warm summer night. Performers were rehearsing in the artificial moonlight that poured from an opalescent globe. The dancers did their stretches, the jugglers practised with their seven balls, and knife throwers slung their knives at revolving targets.
    Women in red and yellow outfits rode on unicycles, balancing a stack of books on their heads. Women in golden dresses stood on the backs of horses, white birds on their outstretched hands.
    Under the glow of a Chinese lantern a girl wrapped in the universal flag of imagination wielded a starry wand. With the wand she turned a furry fruit into a rabbit, the rabbit into a bird, the bird into an angel, the angel into a star, and she sent the star into the sky, where it twinkled merrily. Mistletoe smiled at the girl as she went past. The girl looked at her, puzzled.
    Mistletoe watched a harlequin execute somersaults through hoops of coloured lights. A black girl dressed like a Valkyrie flew around in the air and swooped down through a triangle of fire, singing.
    Nearby there was a blue tent with the sign of the pentagram. The door flap opened and a magician with milk-white eyes came out. The magician wore a white suit and a black top hat, and carried a cane whose upper section had two entwined snakes. But the magician, turning around, became a beautiful woman in a blue suit with a pentagram wand. She danced over to Mistletoe, and said:
    ‘We thought you’d never show up.’

12
    Mistletoe, surprised that she had been expected, felt the heat of an inexplicable fire above her head.
    The magician in the blue suit with the different back led Mistletoe to the centre of the field. Then she clapped her hands together three times, and said:
    ‘Hey, daughters of Pan, guess who’s here.’
    The harlequin stopped somersaulting, and landed in perfect balletic balance. The conjuror allowed a dove to circle the air untransformed. The girls riding the horses leapt down, and the flying black girl dropped gracefully into their midst. Soon the jugglers, knife throwers, unicyclists and dancers had all gathered round in a circle. They stared and then, as if in sudden recognition, one of them cried:
    ‘It’s Mistletoe!’
    ‘It’s our Mistletoe!’ said another.
    ‘We thought we’d never see you again.’
    ‘We thought you’d forgotten us.’
    Then they clustered round her, welcoming their sister back to their enchanted world.
    ‘Perform for us!’ the conjuror cried.
    ‘But what shall I do?’ Mistletoe asked.
    The innocence of the question made them laugh. Mistletoe still looked perplexed. Then the magician touched her on the head with the pentagram wand and Mistletoe remembered what her special talent was in that world.
    A large white canvas stood before her. The conjuror gave Mistletoe her wand. Without thinking, as if she had been