The Khajiit Dances of Belkarth

Dear Fasir,

I hope you and your family are well. I am sorry me and Sana cannot meet with you and your wife at the Feast of the Tiger as per custom. As you know, yesterday my sister Ausliah got married in Belkarth and it’s impossible for us to come back in time.

In compensation for our absence, I shall tell you what we’ve witnessed, as if it were one of those curious stories that you always have had a liking for. It happened that, when the wedding ceremony ended, the invitees went out in front of the shrine and started grabbing bags filled with sand while tying sleigh bells on their ankles and arms. When I asked one of the groom’s invitees what all of this was for, he confusedly told me, as if it was an obvious thing: “It’s for the dance, of course”. I was quite puzzled until my sister came and explained the meaning of this to us.

Apparently many generations ago a group of nomad Khajiit merchants were passing by Belkarth. One of the cat-women was promised to one of the cat-men in the group, and they decided to hold the wedding in the village. They invited the whole town, who came full of curiosity to witness the strange wedding traditions of the Khajiit. As part of the ceremony the Khajiit started dancing their traditional wedding dance, and taught it to the villagers. The Belkarthians loved that dance so much that even after the caravan left they would dance it in weddings and important festivals. In fact, the dance proved to be so popular that it passed from generation to generation until this very day.

So there we were, me and Sana, each with a bag of sand in one of our hands and sleigh bells tied in our ankles and arms. We were organized by hand-grabbed pairs in a straight line, with the newlyweds on the front. The musicians started striking out the music and the dance began. Merciful Morwha, that was, without a speck of a doubt, the most tiresome dance I have ever danced. We were galloping like horses and jumping like maniacs up and down the place, shaking the sand bags in the air. Now we detach, now we reunite, now in two straight lines, now in a circle, but always galloping and jumping. And do not even dare to lower your arms while you do all of this! That sand-bag has to keep shacking all the time.

Just to make you an idea of how tiresome this dance is I will tell you this. Part of the dance is that in the middle of it the dancers stop and shout “Bring the sugar!”. Then, while the musicians keep playing, the children and young ones amongst the invitees, who are spared the dance, come with trays holding up bowls full of a white powder. I was dumbfounded, there was no way Moon Sugar was being served so casually. Just as I suspected, the white powder was just regular sugar, a necessary deviance from the original tradition I suppose. What kind of dance is this that needs Moon Sugar for the dancers to keep going?

To be absolutely honest to you, dear Fasir, I kind of wish there had been real Moon Sugar in what I ate. It would have helped me confront the rest of the dance with more energy and dignity. The second part involves quicker jumps, more intensive galloping and going up and down the dance area like a maniac. I felt like my toes were in the air more time than they were in the ground. I am a strong man, and Sana has the stamina of a regiment of legionaries, but even we have our limits, so we tried to escape from the dance.

Here’s the thing, you don’t want to dance? Too bad. As part of the dance older invitees, who are also spared from dancing, are dressed as snakes and armed with fake spears. Their role is to avoid anyone leaving the dance by poking the dissidents with the false weapon. We concluded that it was better to die of exhaustion than of incessant poking, so we returned among the dancers and finished the dance.

As you can probably imagine we couldn’t feel our legs after the dance, and neither could I this morning. We are currently hosted in an inn, so I came down to have breakfast and, wouldn’t you know it, I saw a Khajiit traveller at a table. I sat with her and asked how they manage to endure their dance. She was visibly confused at my question, so I described to her the Khajiit wedding dance I had to fight through. I could not believe it when she told me that, despite traveling all over Elsweyr as an itinerant merchant, she hadn’t even heard of that wedding dance.

So here you have it Fasir: the story of an out-of-town couple, a diabolical dance and an unexplained mystery. I know your brother will also marry soon, so take this piece of advice. If he does it in Belkarth, don’t go!

Always your friend,

Axido.