Sarisha’s dance was the most exquisite choreographic performance that no one had ever seen. The peaceful music of the lute was not dance music, yet she danced to it with moves that wholly complemented its eerie tone; moves that she hadn’t thought she even knew—she made them up as she went and they came to her as naturally as breathing—moves that took her feather-light body through the unnerving silence of the bored crowd like a soothing breath of wind from a distant land. It was a dance of great sadness and gloom, an incarnation of her mood that contrary to her hopes had not gotten any better during the week she’d already spent at sea. It was a dance of her fantasies, a dance of mind, too perfect to be performed with a body even as finely tuned for the purpose as hers, and while the carefree woman she’d once used to be continued the dream-ballet that no one but she could see, Chandra leaned her coated back to the cushion of her chair and sulked at the table of four she’d somehow been allowed to keep all to herself for hours.<br/><br/>Even though wrapped under a deep-black trench coat, the woman didn’t exactly blend into the crowd. Had it been an ordinary day, or even as close to ordinary as the seven days she’d already spent at the mercy of the wicked ocean, she’d have lost the black that concealed her barely clothed body—in the elegant belly dance costume she’d become known to wear—from eyes that sought for something more pleasant to focus on than the unsteady foam on top of one’s pint. There wouldn’t have been a great gap of emptiness between her and the rest of the crowd as if she was protected by some invisible barrier, and she wouldn’t have been sitting alone. Chandra paid no attention to the phantasms that raged in absolute silence behind the porthole by her head as if a window to her state of mind, and but stared unfocused across the lounge where young Sasha of her imagination leapt on her toes from table to table and blew kisses on the foreheads of all the people who just didn’t seem to care.<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>