Time Dancers (45 page)

Shutratek shouted, “Sak!” then fell at my feet unconscious and dying. She’d had a massive heart attack. I bent to pick her up. I held her head and tried to make her breathe in, but she never did. She never breathed and she never awoke. I closed her eyes with my hand and laid her down. I looked up again at the balloon, climbing ten thousand, twenty thousand feet in the sky and trailing a long tail of white and black smoke.

“Sailor,” I said, “Sailor.”

A moment later, from somewhere above and behind me on top of the stone wall, I heard a voice. I knew the voice well.

“Bonjour, mon petit,”
he said.

STEVE CASH lives in Springfield, Missouri, where he was born and raised and educated. After an attempt at gaining a college degree, he lived on the west coast, in Berkeley, California, and elsewhere. He returned to Springfield to become an original member of the band the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. He is the co-author of the seventies pop hits “Jackie Blue” and “If You Wanna Get to Heaven.” For the last thirty-three years he has played harmonica, written songs, perfomed with the band, helped in the raising of his children, and read books. He is writing the final novel in the Meq trilogy.

Time Dancers
is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

A Del Rey Trade Paperback Original

Copyright © 2006 by Steve Cash

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Princeton University Press: Excerpt from “Ithaka” from
C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems,
by C. P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, copyright © 1972 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group: Excerpt from
The Spirit of St. Louis
by Charles Lindbergh, copyright © 1953 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright renewed 1981 by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group.

eISBN-13: 978-0-345-49340-8

eISBN-10: 0-345-49340-0

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