WHY?

"Well, someone's got to look after the food."

I MEANT WHY DON'T YOU DANCE?

" ‘Cos I'm old, that's why."

YOU ARE AS OLD AS YOU THINK YOU ARE.

"Huh! Yeah? Really? That's the kind of stupid thing people always say. They always say, My word, you're looking well. They say, There's life in the old dog yet. Many a good tune played on an old fiddle. That kind of stuff. It's all stupid. As if being old was some kind of thing you should be glad about! As if being philosophical about it will earn you marks! My head knows how to think young, but my knees aren't that good at it. Or my back. Or my teeth. Try telling my knees they're as old as they think they are and see what good it does you. Or them."

IT MAY BE WORTH A TRY.

More figures moved in front of the firelight. Death could see striped poles strung with bunting.

"The lads usually bring a couple of barn doors down here and nail ‘em together for a proper floor," observed Miss Flitworth. "Then everyone can join in."

FOLK DANCING? said Death, wearily.

"No. We have some pride, you know."

SORRY.

"Hey, it's Bill Door, isn't it?" said a figure looming out of the dusk.

"It's good old Bill!"

"Hey, Bill!"

Death looked at a circle of guileless faces.

HALLO. MY FRIENDS.

"We heard you'd gone away," said Duke Bottomley. He glanced at Miss Flitworth, as Death helped her down from the horse. His voice faltered a bit as he tried to analyse the situation.

"You're looking very... sparkly... tonight, Miss Flitworth," he finished, gallantly.

The air smelled of warm, damp grass. An amateur orchestra was still setting up under an awning.

There were trestle tables covered with the kind of food that's normally associated with the word "repast" - pork pies like varnished military fortifications, vats of demonical pickled onions, jacket potatoes wallowing in a cholesterol ocean of melted butter. Some of the local elders had already established themselves on the benches provided, and were chewing stoically if toothlessly through the food with the air of people determined to sit there all night, if necessary.

"Nice to see the old people enjoying themselves," said Miss Flitworth. Death looked at the eaters. Most of them were younger than Miss Flitworth.

There was a giggle from somewhere in the scented darkness beyond the firelight.

"And the young people," Miss Flitworth added, evenly. "We used to have a saying about this time of year. Let's see... something like "Corn be ripe, nuts be brown, petticoats up... " something." She sighed. "Don't time fly, eh?"

YES.

"You know, Bill Door, maybe you were right about the power of positive thinking. I feel a lot better tonight."

YES?

Miss Flitworth looked speculatively at the dance floor. "I used to be a great dancer when I was a gel. I could dance anyone off their feet. I could dance down the moon. I could dance the sun up."

She reached up and removed the bands that held her hair in its tight bun, and shook it out in a waterfall of white.

"I take it you do dance, Mr. Bill Door?"

FAMED FOR IT, MISS FLITWORTH.

Under the band's awning, the lead fiddler nodded to his fellow musicians, stuck his fiddle under his chin, and pounded on the boards with his foot -

"Hwun! Htwo! Hwun htwo three four..."

Picture a landscape. with the orange light of a crescent moon drifting across it. And, down below, a circle of fire-light in the night.

There were the old favourites - the square dances, the reels, the whirling, intricate measures which, if the dancers had carried lights, would have traced out topological complexities beyond the reach of ordinary physics, and the sort of dances that lead perfectly sane people to shout out things like ‘Do-si-do!" and ‘Och-aye!" without feeling massively ashamed for quite a long time.

When the casualties were cleared away the survivors went on to polka, mazurka, fox-trot, turkey-trot and trot a variety of other plants and beasts, and then to those dances where people form an arch and other people dance down it, which are incidentally generally based on folk memories of executions, and other dances where people form a circle, which are generally based on folk memories of plagues.

Through it all two figures whirled as though there was no tomorrow.

The lead fiddler was dimly aware that, when he paused for breath, a spinning figure tapdanced a storm out of the floor and a voice by his ear said:

YOU WILL CONTINUE, I PROMISE YOU.

When he flagged a second time a diamond as big as his fist landed on the boards in front of him. A smaller figure sashayed out of the dancers and said:

"If you boys don't go on playing, William Spigot. I will personally make sure your life becomes absolutely foul."

And it returned to the press of bodies.

The fiddler looked down at the diamond. It could have ransomed any five kings the world would care to name. He kicked it hurriedly behind him.

"More power to your elbow, eh?" said the drummer, grinning.

"Shut up and play!"

He was aware that tunes were turning up at the ends of his fingers that his brain had never known. The drummer and the piper felt it too. Music was pouring in from somewhere. They weren't playing it. It was playing them.

IT IS TIME FOR A NEW DANCE TO BEGIN.

"Duurrrump-da-dum-dum," hummed the fiddler, the sweat running off his chin as he was caught up in a different tune.

The dancers milled around uncertainly, unsure about the steps. But one pair moved purposefully through them at a predatory crouch, arms clasped ahead of them like the bowsprit of a killer galleon. At the end of the floor they turned in a flurry of limbs that appeared to defy normal anatomy and began the angular advance back through the crowd.

"What's this one called?"

TANGO.

"Can you get put in prison for it?"

I DON'T BELIEVE SO.

"Amazing."

The music changed.

"I know this one! It's the Quirmish bullfight dance! Oh-lay!"

WITH MILK?

A high-speed fusillade of hollow snapping noises suddenly kept time with the music.

"Who's playing the maracas?"

Death grinned.

MARACAS? I DON'T NEED... MARACAS.

And then it was now.

The moon was a ghost of itself on one horizon. On the other there was already the distant glow of the advancing day.

They left the dance floor.

Whatever had been propelling the band through the hours of the night drained slowly away. They looked at one another. Spigot the fiddler glanced down at the jewel.

It was still there.

The drummer tried to massage some life back into his wrists.

Spigot stared helplessly at the exhausted dancers.

"Well, then... " he said, and raised the fiddle one more time.

Miss Flitworth and her companion listened from the mists that were threading around the field in the dawn light.

Death recognised the slow, insistent beat. It made him think of wooden figures, whirling through Time until the spring unwound.

I DON'T KNOW THAT ONE.

"It's the last waltz."

I SUSPECT THERE'S NO SUCH THING.

"You know," said Miss Flitworth, "I've been wondering all evening how it's going to happen. How you're going to do it. I mean, people have to die of something, don't they? I thought maybe it was going to be of exhaustion, but I've never felt better. I've had the time of my life and I'm not even out of breath. In fact it's been a real tonic, Bill Door. And I -"

She stopped.

"I'm not breathing, am I." It wasn't a question. She held a hand in front of her face and huffed on it.

NO.

"I see. I've never enjoyed myself so much in all my life... ha! So... when -?"

YOU KNOW WHEN YOU SAID THAT SEEING ME GAVE YOU QUITE A START?