The seventh dancer

Andy was there, the first time I saw Red-And-Black dance. And the last time. At least, the last so far. It’s possible I’ll see them again.

I might even dance with them.

***

It was at IVFDF, the Inter-Varsity Folk Dance Festival, in the February of last year. Half-way through the Saturday night ceilidh, two hours of dancing, laughter and merriment had left us joyful and panting. At the half-way point, as is common, there was a display spot – a rapper dance side, I don’t remember the name. Their figures were mediocre but their boots struck a lively rhythm on the vinyl flooring and their squire’s patter was engaging and we were yelling and clapping. IVFDF was at the University of Sheffield that year and we were in the great Octogen dance-hall, the room dramatically lit for the occasion with blue and lurid crimson lights. We were around the edges of the room, the older dancers standing or sitting on chairs, the younger cross-legged on the floor in front of them. Andy and I were among the latter, although our knees were starting to protest.

After the display team had gathered up their double-handled rapper swords and left, but before the caller spoke or anyone moved to stand, the main doors beside the bar swung open with a crash. I’d swear there was no-one touching them – they had large windows and the corridor was well-lit. The ceilidh-goers in front of the doors scrambled hurriedly aside as the new dancers came in – border Morris dancers, black trousers, black-and-red raggy jackets, faces covered with lines and swirls of black and red paint. Their battered black top-hats were made taller by ranks of feathers – pheasant, I’d have said, but less coppery and redder than is common for that bird. They had sticks, of course.

Border Morris is typically loud, boastful, bellicose. Whoops and screams accompany the figures. But these dancers didn’t say anything, didn’t make any vocal noise. They let their stamping boots and clashing sticks speak for them. The music was a single woman, dressed like them in raggy jacket and all-covering face-paint, long hair black as shadow, carrying a fiddle. I watched as she tucked it under her chin and the six dancers forms up in a circle, facing inwards, perfectly still for a moment.

Andy nudged me, his lean, boyish face breaking into a grin. “We’re in for a treat now, Dan,” he whispered. “You’ve heard of Red-And-Black?”

I nodded, smiling back at him. Everyone in the folk scene had. They were a Morris side, in form like any other, except – no-one knew who they were. They were never invited or booked. They turned up, danced – only once at any festival – and left, all without speaking. Even the name Red-And-Black was more a description. They were thought to be any number of other border sides or an amalgamation of several, their striking face-paint disguising features which would otherwise be recognisable. Now, I watched them with Andy.

The woman was a strong player. The eerie wail alone might have held us entranced, but we were too busy watching the dancers.

I have never seen Morris quite like it. The squire called no figures. Truthfully I am not sure who was squire but assume it was the man in front-left when they formed two lines facing forwards, a medium-height man with a thin, bony face and sharp nose – but I could make out nothing more under a spiral of black and red paint that seemed whirl-pool like to pull into the middle of his face. Others had curving patterns of paint in the same colours that made me think of crashing waves, or ragged storm-clouds. It was hard to see their faces and harder to remember them. Anonymity is the effect border face-paint allegedly strives for but seldom reaches… but I could not have picked out any of these people in mufti. As they danced around the black and red taters of their raggy jackets trailed their movements or flared outwards whem they spun. They reeled, circled and performed other wide, flowing figures. Every step was in time, every movement of the six dancers perfectly synchronised, but the patterns were… incomplete, somehow. Often, as they spread out, it seemed there was a gap in their lines, that there should have been a seventh dancer. Only when they rushed in for every chorus did this odd feeling vanish. Then, making a perfect circle, they were clearly complete.

I did not like that chorus. Their sticks struck the floor – two opposite dancers, then the dancers to the right of each of those, then the final pair. It was like two waves, across the set from each other, slowly circling counter-clockwise around the centre. Crack-crack crack. Then they all stamped, twice, right then left, in such perfect time it sounded like two giant boots hitting the floor. The movement of those sticks and then the legs in that circle made me think of the legs of something – a curled-up woodlouse or millepede, perhaps – waves of movement progressing along a body. Or perhaps not the legs but the mouth-parts, folding inexorably inwards.

As the dance continued I saw they were progressing, a somewhat uncommon thing in Morris. Whenever they lined up in a figure someone had moved, corner to centre, middle to end. I tried but could not work out the pattern. The figures of the dance were wide and they moved fast with a curious loping stride that looked too smooth for the heavy, perfectly synchronised stepping they paced everything out with. And, as I say, in every reel, every wide fast-moving circle, there was a sense of an absence, a space where another figure might usefully have danced. In every wide-spread figure, but never in that tight bunched up chorus with the crack-crack-crack thud-thud.

At the climax of the dance the fiddler stopped abruptly and the dancers bunched together, facing inwards, for a final chorus. They went through it twice. Cack-crack crack. Thud-thud. Crack-crack-crack. Thud. Thud.

For a moment there was silence. Then the applause started. Red-And-Black seemed indifferent and danced out, less elegant now, the woman’s playing somehow diminished, but still without a word and without so much as a glance at the audience.

I glanced at Andy and was surprised to find him pale, staring after the now vanished dancers. “Andy?”

“There was… something that…”

“Is something wrong?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it and shook his head, managing a weak grin. “No, forget it. Come on, Dan, let’s dance. I think those ladies are looking at you.” I followed his gaze to a pair of young women in flowing dresses and as we stood up and reached for partners, Red-And-Black was momentarily forgotten.

***

I am a reticent man by nature. Andy and I had met in the first week of graduate school and become friends with a speed that, in retrospect, seems amazing. The first and most obvious thing we had in common was being master’s-by-research students with no hope of converting our projects to doctorates. Exeter is a strong university and the graduate programme was mostly PhD candidates, or taught masters. We both had projects we actually wanted to do but lacked the standing to attract funding and supervisors for the longer course. We called ourselves The Losers, half-ironically. Thus I suppose the second thing we had in common was a certain lack of career focus and determination, twinned with a genuine love of our subjects. The third thing was folk-dancing.

Exeter is a strong university in another way – their student folk society is one of the best in the country. Neither Andy no I grew up with folk-dancing but after our first ceilidh we were hooked. Before Christmas of our first year, we were planning our attendance at festivals the following semester.

Andy was in the astrophysics department, studying our solar system’s Oort Cloud – the vast, almost unbelievably distant torus of ice comets that still amazingly orbit our sun. Icebergs in space, he called them. But his project was on the gaps in the cloud, the voids where there was no ice. I was – still am, I suppose – enrolled in anthropology. The details of my project, an overly-ambitious proposal to compare elements of sacrificial magic across many pre-Roman societies in Britain and western Europe, gripped me at the time but do not now. Indeed, the very thought of sacrifice – from the Latin for “to make sacred” – now chills me.

***

It must have been May when I realised how deeply affected Andy had been by the dancing Red-And-Black, as well as how well he’d hidden it from me. Or rather, I started to realise but did not understand the depths of it… As usual, I had crossed the campus at lunchtime to the café below the physics department where Andy and I customarily met. After waiting ten minutes for him, I ventured through the glass doors into that half-familiar, half-alien world of a very different academia to mine and headed for his office.

The physics building had been cutting-edge architecture at one point. Now the interior walls of smooth grey concrete seem like a throwback to the sixties, but it is a pleasant enough space. Andy’s office is tiny, barely large enough for two desks (their graduate students share offices) but the windows are large and afford an excellent view over the quad. The walls were covered with posters about the European space agency, the Webb space telescope and the Artemis missions. I could never look at those without thinking of the Artemis of Ephesus, a radically non-Greek and hauntingly inhuman deity). Andy’s roommate was away, at a conference in Berlin, I think. As master’s students, no-one pressured us to go to these – so we could focus on research, not presentations or networking. A double-edged thing, I suppose.

Andy was standing, not facing the door, at his whiteboard. He didn’t hear me come in and continued sketching as I approached. I looked at the patterns and arrows and suddenly realised with a thrill he wasn’t working on the secrets of the Oort Cloud but was depicting the figures of Red-And-Black’s dances. I must have made a noise at this point, for Andy jerked and dropped his pen, before turning to me. For a second he looked scared, almost guilty. “Dan? What are you doing here?”

“You weren’t downstairs. I thought I’d come up...” I trailed of. “This is Red-And-Black’s figures?”

“Yes.” He laughed, a forced, false sound, and I looked at him with concern. “Silly of me, but I felt the need to… solve them,” he added.

“You mean the progressions? Those were odd.”

“The -? Oh.” Andy shook his head. “No, I’ve figured those out. It makes sense if you assume they’re one layer of a three-dimensional set of dancers and the progression is diagonally through the layers.” I nodded, having long accepted that Andy is much smarter than I am. “No,” he continued, “it’s the spacing... it’s like…”

“There should be another dancer.”

“A seventh dancer. Yes…” He stared at the board for another moment, biting his lip, then grinned and ran a hand through his fringe of dirty-blond hair. “I guess I’ve succumbed to grad-school procrastination, right? Anyway, let’s get lunch.” He put the lid back on his pen, set it on the base of the whiteboard and walked past me to the door before I replied.

In retrospect, that too-quick shaking off of the subject should have been a warning. When I tried to bring the subject up again though, that day at lunch or that night in the terraced house we shared a ten-minute cycle from campus, Andy would laugh and change the subject. He said something about getting a mathematic student to look at it, about strange curves and non-Euclidian lines. I did not understand then. Now, I do. Not intellectually, not in mathematical terms… but I have seen those lines.

***

We were still in love with the folk scene, as only young men who have never before had friends and hobbies so neatly align can be. After than day, we did start sketching and discussing the geometry of the figures and progression – those easy, logical progression that didn’t require missing layers or missing dancers – of the dances at the Exeter ceilidhs. We were analysers and classifiers, a common affliction among academics. If either of us had had any musical ear, I suppose we would have discussed the tunes in the same way. But in general, we didn’t talk about Morris figures - and in particular neither of us mentioned Red-And-Black.

***

The second time we saw Red-And-Black was at Lichfield Folk Festival, in June. It was unseasonably hot, I remember. It was the middle of the day and we’d just been watching a klezmer music workshop. (Watching a music workshop at a festival is not quite etiquette, but we were both non-musicians and intrigued by the sound and had asked permission of the workshop -leader – a tall, quiet woman with a grave face and long shadow-black hair - and sat quietly and respectively). We were in a white bell-tent, sitting on chairs around the edge of the space. The venue was small, barely six meters across. If I’d thought about it, I would have been amazed that anyone would choose to dance here, let alone a side of some reputation who only danced once at each festival. The workshop had finished and the musicians were packing up when (even in the tent we could sense it) the sun came out from behind the clouds and a blast of warm, dank air moved over the field. Red-And-Black came in – as before, six dancers in a line, faces obscured by various swirling or waving patterns, raggy jackets in red and black, black boots, dark, gnarled sticks. I glanced at the foreman – the same whirlpool face-paint but I thought it was a different person. Their music was certainly a different person, a male squeeze-box player. But the tune was the same – wild and hunting – and so was the dance. In their loping, looping figures they came very close to the audience, so close I felt the stir of air as they passed me, but never once did they either hesitate or glance at their audience. It was almost like they did not see us.

The Klezmer musicians and Andy and I all stared, fascinated. What I remember most clearly is that, while before they had danced on a vinyl floor and now they danced on grass, the sound of that odd, unpleasant chorus was just as clear and loud. Crack-crack-Crack. Thud-thud. And at the end, twice through. Crack-crack-crack, thud-thud. Crack-crack-crack. Thud. Thud. Just a beat longer between those two last giant stamps.

I glanced at Andy as they left, seemingly drained but still in perfect sync as they danced out, ignoring totally the (exceedingly small) audience and their clapping. This time he didn’t look shaken. He smiled to himself, a grave, secretive smile. There was something in his eyes I recognised from his first research breakthrough – not triumph, nothing so personal, but pure elation at uncovering something profound. But when I asked him about it, stumbling over how to phrase it, he merely shook his head.

As we prepared to go, I watched the lady who’d led the workshop stride across the tent and a memory caught in my mind. “Excuse me,” I said.

She turned back to me. “Yes?”

“At IVFDF… you were playing for them, weren’t you? Red-And-Black?”

She looked puzzled for a second but then shook her head. “I’ve never played for Morris, let alone those guys.”

“Oh. My mistake. Thank you for the – for letting us watch the workshop.”

“You’re welcome.”

I frowned as she turned to go. Everything about her baring, her face, her voice, said she was not lying. But I knew it had been her at Sheffield, playing for them.

Klezmer is often described as a music of grief. It comes from an Eastern European, often but not exclusively Jewish, tradition – many peoples but all used to invasion, deportation, pogroms, massacres. I would describe it more exactly as a music of survival, of coming through and yes, the grief is there, but so is the simple enduring triumph of still being alive.

A music of grief is, perhaps, what I need now.

I miss Andy.

***

It was the week before Towersey, a folk festival in the August bank holiday, when Andy came to see me in my office. For the past several years Towersey has been at the Claydon estate in Buckinghamshire and that morning I had – quite by chance – come some plans of an old, possibly pre-Roman, enclosure there. The location was in the woods next to the current manner, separated by ditches and walls from any publicly accessible part of the estate grounds or the festival itself. I’d printed off the plans – a map, some more detailed sketches of the walls and some notes - and emailed Andy but I was surprised when he came over to the history department.

Our building is very different to the physics building, much older and perhaps more what people imagine an academic environment to look like. Threadbare carpets and wooden walls create an atmosphere not unlike a library. Also like a library, people tend to speak softly, in the corridors at least. The overall effect is a kind of muffled drowsiness that I found quite pleasant. Unlike Andy, my office is not shared – but it is even smaller than his and has only a tiny window so I do not know I had the better of it. He knocked – one-two-three one-two, I remember – and came in.

“Dan. So, you’ve found us an alternative venue at Towersey?”

I laughed. “Perhaps for camping – we might be able to find space for two sleeping bags. But certainly not for dancing. No, it’s walled off anyway and photos suggest the ground is rough as well as forested. I didn’t print those out, just the old plans. Here.”

The plans were part of a digitised archive of medieval maps, surveys and deeds of ownership, held at the University of Oxford and free to academics. This one was undated and the spidery writing and sketch-like draftsmanship made it hard for me to even guess at an age. But the current Claydon manor and its precursors, dating back more than five hundred years, were entirely absent. The enclosure was described as just that, an enclosure – no attempt had been made by either the medieval draftsman or the curators at Oxford to explain it. The space was not large and the walls described an irregular seven-sided polygon. Actually there were seven separate walls and the spaces between them were just that – spaces, not doorways or arches. According to the sketches there was no evidence of lintel stones between the walls, or of spaces where they could have gone. According to the document, in medieval times the walls had been no more than six feet high. Even when newly built it was probably not much higher.

Andy leant over my cramped desk and studied the plans. “Interesting. So it’s always been open to the sky.”

“Yes.”

“Sky above, earth below…” he trailed off, running a finger over the print-out. “And seven entrances. Seven approaches?”

“Perhaps.” I frowned, suddenly vaguely uneasy.

“Well.” He grinned. “And you’ve looked at modern maps and there’s no access at all?”

“No. No public access, at any rate. It’s past the main house and gardens, a tangle of old woods . There’s a ditch and a fairly new brick wall all about it.”

Andy nodded. He was quiet, thoughtful, as we went for lunch. I didn’t know, but maybe should have guessed, what he was thinking.

***

Towersey Festival. The August bank holiday weekend, grass like straw, the air restless with summer wind – gusting, changing direction, barely cooling us. The festival site is a huge field. One edge is bounded by a long, narrow lake with a single grassy causeway it. Beyond this is a wide lawn, slopping upward to Claydon estate, the manor house, outbuildings and formal gardens surrounded by walls and tall hedges, and to the right that larger walled-off area of tangled trees.

I did not see Red-And-Black at their performance there. Not their public performance, anyway. In truth, I had not thought of them in connection with Towersey – we had been to other folk weekends since Lichfield and they had not turned up at those, or anywhere else that we’d heard of. And there are other festivals on the August bank holiday.

Towersey is called the dancer’s festival and on Saturday they often have twelve hours or more of ceilidhs in the main dance tent – a large rectangular marque, sprung wooden flooring set up over the grass with the band at one end and ranks of white plastic lawn chairs around the other three sides. The official Morris display had already performed and the ceilidh dancing resumed. It was dusk, the sky still electric blue to the west but stars beginning to emerge in the east. I left for a few minutes to relive myself. When I returned, Andy was gone.

At first, I thought he might be dancing but I quickly scanned the floor and dismissed that idea. I turned to the people sitting beside our seats and asked if they’d seen him. One of them nodded. “Yes. Those other Morris dancers came in… the weird ones. At the end, he ran after them.”

“Weird ones?”

“Yes. They didn’t say anything. Stick dancers, raggy jackets in red and black.”

I blinked. Why would Andy -? Then, abruptly, I knew. A seventh dancer. A seven-sided enclosure. I knew exactly where they were and, somehow, I knew nothing good could come of it.

I ran from that tent. It seemed to take an age to cross the festival site, dodge through the people coming and going across that narrow causeway and run up that lawn. The manor house has some floodlights but the walled-off tangle of forest beside it was unlit and but the time I reached it the sky was fully dark, only star-light and a full moon lighting me.  The brick wall here was not ancient or crumbling and by feel alone it took me some time to find a place where I could plant a foot and scramble over.

Beyond, in the woods, it was even darker. I wanted to hurry but I had to proceed slowly. Somehow I knew that they – Red-And-Black– had not needed to slow down in site of the darkness. Still, the enclosure was large and in the centre of the wood. I could hardly miss it, I told myself, as I pressed forward.

And I found them easily enough. No music to guide me but I heard the rhythmic, horribly loud thud of their booted feet striking the rough dry earth. As I stumbled forwards something pale loomed out of the darkness in front of me. I reached out to touch the wall of the enclosure and I followed it to the left, to the nearest gap. Inside was better-lit. There were no trees to block the star- and moonlight, just mostly bare earth and the occasional clump of grass. Red-And-Black were dancing, of course. And – it seemed inevitable – Andy was dancing with them.

I caught my breath. In the moonlight, flowing as quickly as the other dancers through their figures, never putting a foot wrong, he was – beautiful. He was clad as I’d seen him before and the others were in full kit and face-paint but he still seemed an organic part of their set. Every time they came in for the chorus, he stayed outside the set. Dancing on the spot to the same rhythm as their sticking and stamping. Crack-crack-crack. Thud-thud.

I called out to him. Maybe, without music to distract the other dancers, that was foolish, but they paid me no heed. Nor did Andy. I might as well have not been there. In the second or third chorus I ran over to shake his shoulder but he totally ignored me. His face was serene, eyes fixed on the dancers. I do not actually think they realised I was there. Then Andy pulled away effortlessly, my hand slipping from his shoulder, into the next figure.

For each figure, Andy finished at a different position. Overall he was circling the central spot where the chorus was… but he was also moving closer each time. Spiralling inwards. Then came the last chorus.

This time, rather than falling back, Andy raced in with the other dancers. His steps were long and loping like theirs, in perfect time, but he pulled ahead and reached the exact centre of the clearing before Red-And-Black formed up around him. And this time their sticks and boots did not strike bare earth. This time they crashed into Andy.

Crack-crack-crack, the sound horribly loud. He was staggering. Thud-thud. He was on the floor and I was screaming. Crack-crack-crack the sticks rose and fell, striking him in pairs, that opposite, circling pattern I’d always thought somehow ominous, like the mouthparts of some insect. I was running towards them, yelling something. Thud as six boots crashed into him. Then that terrible pause and once more thud, six boots landing as one.

I stopped running. I was mere feet from the nearest dancer, close enough to see the gleam of sweat on his neck, but I knew there was no point in going further. They would not strike Andy again. The dance was over.

As one, still not noticing me, the six members of Red-And-Black turned outwards and danced off, not in a line as I’d seen before but in sperate directions, though six of the seven gaps. I didn’t bother to chase them or cry out. Instead I looked at Andy.

He had been struck precisely thirty-six times, by stick and boot. I don’t actually know if he was dead. His gaze was terribly blank and in the moonlight I could see blood at his temple and on his mouth. I thought of a bird, something swift and graceful struck down in its flight. I believe I was crying.

Then the ground stirred. Panicked, I leapt back. And this, even beyond the passionless fury of those blank-faced attackers, is what I cannot forget.

Around Andy, the ground… circled. Like water, or like something living. A mouth, perhaps. Two ridges of earth rose and sped around and I recognised the paired, opposite, counter-clockwise movement of the stick figure in the chorus. But this was a continuous movement, two curves, a pair of semi-circles whirling around the body of my friend like waves. As the two ridge of earth moved closer to the centre of the circle, closer to Andy, they banked higher. Andy’s head moved – whether he was alive or the earth shifted beneath him I do not know – and for a last second the moonlight shone down on his solemn smile. Then the earth closed over him like a wave, like a swallowing mouth, and he was gone.

There was no sign of him. The earth was perfectly smooth in a wide circle perhaps seven meters across.  I raced to the centre and dug frantically, but Andy was gone.

***

I did not tell the police what I’d seen. I said Andy had left the tent with Red-And-Black and told them about the enclosure, hinting he’d been interested in it. They never found any trace of him. I returned to Exeter a broken man, all interest in my studies shattered by that one glimpse of true sacrifice. Or perhaps not shattered, but – focussed. I found Andy’s notes on Red-And-Black, their figures and the missing seventh dancer. I found the sequence he’d drawn of where the seventh dancer would stand in each chorus – that remorseless inward spiral, with its inevitable conclusion. I read his thoughts on the non-Euclidian geometry of the figures and I did not understand the mathematical terms but I could see it vividly. I think – I know – Red-And-Black’s dance is a summoning ritual, a calling-on dance. I still do not know who they are but I am certain it does not actually matter, that they have no will or memory of the things they do. I bear the six men who were Red-And-Black that night no ill-will, another reason I did not tell the police everything.

I can see now, there was an inevitability to it – Andy’s fate was decided the first time we saw Red-And-Black. With his keen insight into patterns, he recognised what they were doing. And he was called by it. By their calling-on dance.

I do not truly enjoy ceilidhs any more but I cannot stop going. I try to see, to embody, the patterns as I dance. Maybe I can become good enough in time to be chosen by Red-And-Black, or whatever awesome, terrible entity lies behind them.

Maybe I will see what Andy saw, at the end.