The man with the luminous green eyes wished to show the world the joys of his country. For him, he said, they did it in the dance, and he wanted to share the similarities of his dance with the other warm countries of her Christmas season.

‘It will be a celebration indeed,’ they decided.

He lifted his chin and donned his cloth hat, showing the children how he strode imperiously back and forth before the court. His people stood in front and behind, their brightly coloured clothing swaying softly in the light breeze. This would be a joy to give, he whispered under his breath, for they had quite forgotten the beauty of their history as well, and although there were many things that had not been right, there had been pleasures to share…

He clapped his hands thrice and looked down his nose. They rose to their feet and he waved a hand languorously. ‘Begin,’ he said, smothering a grin, which rhymed and buffered the smile he had tried not to show.

‘I had this writing perfectly sorted while you were sleeping in your old bag,’ he cried. ‘And now you have awoken an orchestra of illuminati. Where the hell did I get that from,’ he added.

‘Get on with it,’ she replied, her tone equally as imperious as his own.

‘FINE,’ he snarled, but it was inside his head and his lips did not move like others had done the previous evening. Sometimes one does not need to run the words through their heads with their mouths, sometimes one merely thinks them first, decides whether they are worth repeating, and if and when it is time, they say them aloud.

His pantaloons flared softly with the warm wind, the curling toes of his boots just visible under the soft cuffs. I forgot it was so cold here, he whispered again. They don’t seem to mind so much now, but it was harder before. He spoke of a country far to the North, where icy winds blew over a landscape of pointed mountains. Even there, the beauty of dance had been recognised and honed to perfection.

A short nod brought the dancers to their feet, and the beautiful music of the middle part of the world began. It was not a dance of the islands, nor a dance of the men who had left the country so many eons before. It was a dance of drifting sands, and old regrets, of silvered clouds and horses heads. The sway and jingle of coins on each undulating hip reminded him of the beauty that had once been and he lifted his arms with joy.

The most important part of this dance was to keep one’s face as still as possible, especially when one was in such a position. Pasha had not been a word for a very long time in his country, and he understood the reasons behind it, but this… he gazed out at the swirl of light and colour before him… this should never have been lost.

He sent his message further east, and the laughing men of the Indies of old joined, their beautiful women recognising the beat. As they followed the arc of the moon to the south, the darker men rose to their feet.

‘This is not what we forgot,’ their lower neighbour warned them. He shook his spear and stamped his foot in the dust. The carved trunk of a tree growled a warning. diddididdiddidjadoo

‘May I lower my sails,’ the pasha asked. ‘May we step ashore, and dance with you? I’ve brought these things I grabbed from a palm tree and mashed them up and drizzled them with honey, and other things besides, and my friend says it’s the best thing she has ever eaten, and she didn’t ever want to share, even just a little bit. I think they’re called dates.’

The darker man raised an eyebrow. It was majestically bushy, and Pasha sighed. He had always wanted eyebrows like that. 

‘Give us a bite then, and I’ll tell ya,’ the man said. The crispy, soft yet sweet delicacy melted in his tongue.The second bite was much larger, and he shoved as much of it in his mouth as he could without choking. ‘Oh God yes,’ he mumbled around the wonderful dessert.

He turned back to the shore. ‘Let the bastards come and dance with us,’ he cried. ‘They have made the most delicious food on earth, and I need to tell my mum about it.’

Pasha smiled behind his recently grown beard. It would be much easier now to teach them the dance of his people, for this dance had not been forgotten in the under-countries of the world at all, although he’d thought it had.

‘An oboe, you say,’ he asked the musician holding up his instrument. ‘Is that where it began?’

‘Something along those lines,’ the musician replied.

They danced through the midnight and into the dawn, and Pasha swore he saw a man on a carpet fly off into the distant sunrise.

‘Your Christmas is going to be wonderful,’ he said softly. ‘I never knew you would be able to share with my greedy friends the secrets of my own country, but you know innately. It must be all that mixed up blood your family has.’

The writer of old grinned.

‘Must be,’ she said. ‘Good luck.’

He stamped his foot once and summoned the man who would fight a bull. ‘Begin,’ he said quietly and the man flared his cape.

This would be a dance of the ages.

He turned to thank the woman once more, but her voice was fading with each passing hour. Quite soon, she would only be a memory. 

A secret smile dashed across the skies of early morning as a lone horsewoman walked down the paddock to her mumbling horse. She would not understand the ramblings of writers, but that was okay, because this would remind those who knew how to place things in just the right spots.

‘I shall fix it later,’ the old lady wrote.

‘Impossible,’ snorted her companion. ‘One cannot fix perfection.’

‘One will perform perhaps just a little more magic before you steal it away,’ she replied and he knew she would teach him again on how it helped to bring his story to a brighter future. For, although he could see it clearly in his mind’s eye, beside her as he was at the desk in the green room, he knew there needed to be changes and adjustments so the dream he had shared would be clearer and clearer to those who needed to read it rather than see it.

Meanwhile though, he had a show to create and an audience to bring it to.

He stamped his foot and stepped across the stage, his nose in the air… it wasn’t too high, but just high enough to make it appear as if he were pointing at something with his chin.

‘Begin.’