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The first day of the twenty-first century and the "Third Millennium" will be the first day of 2001 AD, not the first day of 2000 AD as is commonly thought [...] yet when discussing such ideas as "millennial rites" and "thousand-year shifts", astrologers and numerologists consider December 31st 1999

to be the crucial date of change, thus getting their calculations wrong by a whole year. The conclusion is obvious. The actual dates are unimportant; it is our perception of the dates that matters. So-called "end-of-the-century fever" has more to do with human hysteria than with astrological significance... ‘

– James Rafferty, Portents and Pathways (1978)

‘When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there.’

– Thomas Jefferson (1787)

1

Waifs and Strays

New York State was celebrating. But that didn’t mean it was happy.

The festivities had spread across the East Coast like a pox, taking Manhattan first, then Brooklyn, then Richmond; the smaller towns had been the last to fall to the fever, and when they’d fallen, they’d fallen with a kind of grudging contempt.

When the garlands and the banners and the polished wooden angels had gone up in Woodwicke – a town the world in general had never really noticed, and probably never would –

their colours were garish and aggressive, the people unwilling to celebrate without a snarl. During the War most of them had been loyal to the losing side, and even now, even after history had given them a hundred and one other things to be unhappy about, they still seemed to want a rematch. Christmas bled from the windows, dripped reluctantly out of the storefronts.

The eighteenth century was in its dying days, and Woodwicke was a town that knew exactly what the President could do with his ‘new age of freedom’s glory’.

But of course, the ‘attractions’ had opened for business even there. The craftsmen, the performers, the novelties; stalls run by middle-aged businessmen pretending to be gypsies and second-rate medicine peddlers masquerading as miracle-workers. Mystics and stargazers, showmen who turned the black arts into an almost-but-not-quite acceptable form of entertainment.

So when Isaac Penley entered the fortune-teller’s tent on Eastern Walk, he instinctively glanced around to make sure no one was watching him. It was the very evening before Christmas Day, and for Isaac – esteemed member of the local council and upstanding pillar of the community, as he’d readily tell anyone who bothered listening to him – the holy festival was about to be laced with a touch of necromancy.

‘Sit down,’ said the witch-woman, and Isaac sat.

The woman was a Negro (Negress, Isaac corrected himself), but she was alone in the tent, unsupervised and unattended. Her face didn’t seem to fit what he knew about the black species; the slave-ships that occasionally docked at Woodwicke carried creatures whose faces all seemed identical to Isaac, pitch-dark and lifeless, but this woman could almost have been fashioned from an entirely different material. Her skin was tinged with ash, her hair streaked with full-moon grey, and her bearing seemed almost aristocratic.

Once, in New Orleans, Isaac had visited a carnival far grander than any that had ever been seen in Woodwicke. At one of the sideshows there had been a huge leather-skinned Negro on a great wooden throne, his half-naked body covered with smudges of red and yellow paint. The Negro’s attendants had informed the audience that this was Konga-Tchin, fearsome warrior-king of darkest Africa, who had slain tigers with his bare hands and destroyed entire armies on the battlefield. The audience had paid good money to hear the tales of Konga-Tchin, the attendants translating the answers he gave to their questions (’Have you ever wrestled a crocodile?’

‘Is it true you eat people in Africa?’). There had been something about his bearing, as well, a kind of nobility; as if he were lost in this land, but still determined to hold on to the memory of his past life