Then he saw Olympe.

She was up near the end of the yard, half-glimpsed through the dancers; up where the Queen danced on top of a cage in whose darkness a snake's coils moved and shifted, up by the King, a squat scarred man wearing only a couple of red kerchiefs knotted around his groin and a belt of blue cord. Like many of the dancers Olympe had stripped, and wore only a thin shift, plastered to her body with sweat; her tignon cast away, her hair a black thick brush exploding around her face; her eyes shut in solitary communion with the music and the dance and the liberty to be utterly herself.

Men danced closer, touched the King's hands or the Queen's. They whirled to fill their mouths with rum and spit it across the blood-spattered signs on the ground, the smell of it a sweet sickish backtaste against smoke and sweat. "Zombi!" cried someone. "Zombi-Damballah!" and touched the serpent's cage. A gold eye like a sequin flashed within. The bodies swayed faster to the rattle of the drums. The music of darkness. Music like that which would pour from an open grave, from the door into the world beyond.

A man cried out and fell shaking to the ground a yard from January's feet. Two women propped him up, and he rolled his head and arched his back, gasped and babbled out words that made no sense. January had seen this before, too; but now it troubled him as it had not before he'd learned the ways of the Christian God. The man's eyes opened and his face changed: aged, shrank, fell in on itself, and when he got to his feet he staggered as if lame. "Legba!" cried someone, "Papa Legba, hi! " The man staggered and limped, reaching out to touch this person or that, crying out in a hoarse croaking voice, his eyes the eyes of something other than human.