The Rover's Band

The title really doesn't fit...

They bring the storm with dancing feet, in shrouds of white, with horns blaring in funereal joy. Slicing rain drumming out laments on black asphalt, peals of thunder ringing out defiance. They bring the storm with drums and dancing and wild delight.
They bring the storm, and we know them, the select few. Each year, it is said, more are taken, and more dance. Each year we, most of us, scoff. I saw them once, under a bridge in the dark of a steamy midsummers night.
I was biking, going home. It was late, I was tired, the air was heavy with humidity and crackled with potential energy. The skies roiled in shades of black and deeper black, and the skyline blazed gold turned green in the haze.
I bike quickly, even when I'm tired, head down, body hunched forward, weight evenly distributed, pressing forward on the balls of my feet, and that night drooping green foliage whipped by unobserved. I lacked attention, and the only intent that I had was to make it to cover before the inevitable storm burst.
Sound travels strangely on the bike path that they call the Green Way, that marches over an old rail line. It runs, for much of its length, at the bottom of a gulch, man carved and steep, if not particularly deep, overthrown by bridges every few hundred yards. The walls form a wind tunnel and the bridges whip even a slight breeze into pirouettes, a mad dance to spirits, and a noticeable annoyance to cyclists, and sometimes the breezes bring hints of things far away, from a direction unexpected.
That night it brought music, and laughter, and the pounding of bare feet. So it was that I heard the dancers long before I saw them. White on white, on glowing blue they dominated the center of the path, instruments held aloft, glinting in the pale yellow light of lamps hanging from the bridge. About them were arrayed a small crowd of people, bikers and joggers held in their travels by the sight, and the sounds. Watching in wonder.
I saw faces there that I recognized, faces in the crowd, swaying idly on the banks, eyes fixed forward, smiling, and as I approached and slowed that was what I took note of. It was only when I dismounted, when I walked my bike to the edge of the bridge beneath which they danced, that I lost my breath, and my sense of time.
Amongst the men and women danced stranger things, horned and bearded, clothed in shadows or in lights, they danced without moving, flickering instead, or floating, half in this world and half in another. Their music seemed not to come from their horns or makeshift drums, but rather from the dancers themselves, and from the asphalt, and the concrete arch of the bridge.
As they danced the skies opened, and the rain began to join in the cacophony and I forced myself to turn away, to ride. I did so with the heaviest of hearts, and as I rode I took joy in the sluicing sheets of rain, in their song stuck in my head, and in the face of the final dancer, fleeting.
It was paler than I would have liked, but it was a face that I had long thought burned, its ashes scattered. Even now, I'm glad to know that he is dancing.