The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  Aiffe was still plainly too dazed to stand, and abruptly he picked her up in his arms, holding her easily as he confronted Sia. The Sunday-best smile withered to a cicatrice on the soft golden face. Nicholas Bonner whispered, “She has no idea how close she came. You and I know.” Sia did not move or reply. The boy said, “That kind of power. She almost broke you. Ignorant, unpracticed, frightened out of her few wits, she almost walked over you. You aren’t quite senile enough not to know.”

  Ben began to chant very loudly, thumping the time on Farrell’s knee: “Hygg, visi, at—Vel soemir pat—Hve ek pylja fet—Ef ek pogn of get.” The tune was dull, but it had a fine swing.

  Nicholas Bonner said politely, “Till next time. Or the time after that.” He turned and walked away, carrying Aiffe as if she were his partner in one of the old court dances. On the porch steps, he stopped and set her on her feet, keeping an arm firmly around her. Aiffe staggered once, clutching at him. They moved slowly off down Scotia Street, leaning their heads together like dreaming lovers.

  Sia said, “Joe.” Farrell propped Ben against a newel post and went to her. She made no room for him in the doorway, and he felt uneasy about squeezing in beside her, so he stood cautiously at her shoulder, watching her watch the street.

  Behind them, Ben droned, “Flestr maor of fra—Hvat fylkir va,” and outside, the Avicenna night flowed past Sia’s house, bearing someone’s barbecue guffaw and the crackling bustle of a baseball game approaching on a portable stereo. Farrell caught a twinkle that he thought might be Nicholas Bonner’s T-shirt vanishing behind a camper truck. His right knee ached where the fire tongs had bruised it.

  “I cannot control what you will remember of this,” she said. “I don’t think I can.” She turned to face him for the first time since Briseis had begun her dreadful crying, and he saw that the challenging gray eyes were alarmingly vague and streaked, and that her dark-honey skin had gone the color of scar tissue, all tone and resilience used up. The smell of her exhaustion filled his mouth, rancid, gritty, and clinging as the smoke of a garbage fire.

  “Perhaps I won’t even try to make you forget.” Her voice, at least, was regaining some life, becoming almost comfortingly acerbic. “You work these things out very well with yourself, you will turn all this—” She gestured around them at the porch, at Ben, at spilled books and scattered furniture. “By morning it will have been some distant foolishness between strangers, maybe a little earthquake thrown in. You are doing it now, I can see you.” Farrell began to protest angrily, but she walked away from him, saying, “It’s not important, do what you want. I have to get Ben into bed.”

  Farrell helped her, though she did not want him to. Far too weary to command him, she ended by letting him bear most of Ben’s weight as they coaxed him up the stairs, to the shoulder-pounding accompaniment of sonorous skaldic jingles. Farrell got the ruined Viking garments off, took them back down to the washing machine, stayed to set the living room to rights, and returned to find Sia sponging Ben’s muddy bruises and brushing shreds of redwood bark out of his stiff hair. Ben had toppled into a turbulent doze, still mumbling rhythmically, his eyes slightly open. Sia was making a sound, too, so softly that Farrell felt it, rather than hearing it, in his eyelids and the roots of his hair. I’ve never been this close to their bed.

  “I was there when she called him,” he said. “Aiffe, Rosanna, she called him right out of the air.” Sia glanced at him briefly and went on bathing Ben. Farrell said, “The way you knew each other—I don’t understand it, but I’m not going to forget it. I don’t want to forget it.”

  Sia said, “Your lute has fallen on the floor in your room. You should go and see if there is damage.” Her blunt, freckled fingers moved over Ben’s body like cloud shadows.

  “Fuck the lute. Is he all right?” The resonant idiocy of the question made him flinch and brace for mockery, but she was almost smiling when she looked at him again.

  She said, “No. Nobody is going to be all right. But coffee would be good, anyway.”

  The lute was unharmed, though two strings had snapped. After bringing her the coffee, he sat on his bed replacing them, listening to Sia singing to Ben in their room on the other side of the house. She sang more clearly now that he was gone, and he could tell that the words were neither in English nor in the wind-language. The melody was bony and elusive, too alien to be ingratiating, but Farrell listened until it began to dissolve into him, note by note, like bubbles of nitrogen in a diver’s bloodstream. He fell asleep wanting to learn to play it on the lute, but he never could.

  Chapter 11

  Gone before I ever got up,” Farrell said. “First thing I did, I didn’t even get dressed, I went to check on him, and he was long gone. She said he ate breakfast, squashed a few snails in the garden, and off to campus. Another typical day down on the bread-and-jelly farm.”

  “What else did she say?” Julie was seated at her drawing table, working intently over a rendering of a diseased retina. When Farrell did not answer, she looked up and waved a bamboo pen for his attention. “What did you say to her, for God’s sake? I refuse to believe you just split the paper and talked about the awful stuff on TV.”

  “She doesn’t have a TV.” Farrell had been watering Julie’s houseplants, overdoing it as usual; now he leaned in the workroom doorway, pretending to examine a hanging spider fern. “I asked her things, Jewel. I really pushed. I asked her how she could possibly let him go back to work, as messed up as he was, and what the hell is it anyway with him and this Egil Eyvindsson persona of his? And she looked at me and said, how about some nice orange juice, and I said, right, how about Nicholas Bonner, where did you and that little sweetheart go to school together? And she poured the orange juice, and that’s the way it went. That big jade plant’s dying, by the way.”

  “No, it’s just sulking. I moved it from the bedroom, and it hasn’t forgiven me yet.” She turned back to the drawing, shaking her head irritably as she studied it, but still speaking directly to him. “It sounds as if you’d switched roles overnight, doesn’t it? Now you’re the one asking impertinent questions, and she’s being not there. Very odd.”

  “She doesn’t look good,” Farrell said. “Whatever truly went on between her and Aiffe and Baby New Year, it took something scary out of her.” He rubbed the side of his knee, which was blue-green and swollen. “At that, she looked a whole lot better than the girl. That’s the one I felt sorry for; I couldn’t help it.” Julie’s head came up swiftly, the dark eyes suddenly disquieted, wind-ruffled water. “Well, I did,” he said. “She was like a kid at her first grown-up party, she was so sure she was in control, part of everything, the big time at last. Poor little twit, she didn’t even know what to wear.”

  Julie said, “Never feel sorry for her.” Her voice was tight and sharp, but it broke upward on the word sorry. She asked very quietly, “And you? Do you have any idea what did go on there last night? What games did they play at the party, Joe?‘’

  Farrell looked back at her for what felt to him like a long time. Then he put his hands in his pockets and wandered to the window behind the drawing table, where he rested his forehead against the dusty, sunset-warm glass and watched Mushy the white cat trudging after starlings in Julie’s tiny back yard. “I lived with a werewolf once,” he said slowly. “Did I ever tell you about her?” Julie raised her left eyebrow slightly and curled her upper lip on the same side. Farrell said, “In New York. It isn’t so much that she was a werewolf. What she mostly was, was nice, Jewish, very unhappy, and with a mother. She said, I remember, she said once being a werewolf was actually a lot less trouble than her goddamn allergies. It wasn’t, of course. She was just saying that.”

  “I’m sure there’s a reason for your telling me all this,” Julie said. “Fairly sure.”

  “Just that I don’t have any particular trouble with the supernatural. It bewilders me about as much as the natural, I can’t always tell them apart.” He turned from the window to watch her playing with the bamb
oo pen as she listened, the long, supple fingers gripping the shaft so strongly that it skidded and twisted like a desperate fish in her hand. He said, “Okay, Point A. The girl, Aiffe, she’s a witch. A real one—maybe not major league yet, but working on it. Working very hard. How’s that so far?”

  “Go on.” Julie put the pen down carefully, swung her chair to face him, and began clicking her thumbnails against each other. Farrell said, “Lord, I bet she clowns around a lot in school, drives the home room teacher crazy. Point B. Seems she’s been trying to summon up demons, three times anyway. I don’t know what happened on the first two tries, but this last time she got Nicholas Bonner. Now, he’s not a demon, says so himself, so I can’t even guess what he is, except old and bad and cute as a button. And clearly a chronic acquaintance of Sia’s, sort of like you and me, which leads us to Point C. Am I going too fast, or too weirdly?”

  “No.” Seeing Farrell looking at her hands, she clasped them firmly together in her calm lap. “I’ve never met her, you know. She never comes to the League things with Egil. Ben. I think the Countess Elizabeth went to see her a few times.”

  Farrell considered that, remembering the cat-faced, strudel-bodied woman who had teased his palm at the dance. “The mind reels. Right, okay, Sia. Who is Sia, what is she, that Ben is a completely different man, physically changed, because of living with her? That she can make a crazy drunk with a gun kneel and grovel and shoot himself in the leg, without touching him? That she can mess with your memory, speak languages that I know do not exist, and keep a vigorous young witch and a—a person of indeterminate species but great, great strength of purpose from coming into her house? I mean, this is no ordinary landlady, Jewel, it’s time to face facts. I will go further and say this is no ordinary marriage counselor. Incidentally, you are aware that we’re having our first high-level conference? I just didn’t think it should go unremarked.”

  He was clowning for her to some degree, and she did smile then, with genuine pleasure, but also with too much understanding. She said, “Look at you. Can’t ever get you talking about what’s really going on in there, and then, when you do start, it’s like a flash flood. A little dangerous.” Farrell was not sure what she meant; but when she bowed her head for a moment and knuckled wearily at a place at the top of her spine, his own backbone shivered and sparked in greedy tenderness, and he took a step toward her. Julie said, “Point D.”

  “Point D,” Farrell said after a silence. “Ben. She was starting to tell me something, I think, right before the trick-or-treaters showed up.” He closed his eyes, trying to hear Sia’s rough, sudden voice asking him, “What do you know about possession?” Slowly, laying the words out as precisely as Julie had set down the bamboo pen, he said, “I read one time, whenever Mozart feels another flute concerto coming on, he takes over this housewife in Strasbourg, dictates it through her. Chopin, Mahler, Brahms, apparently they all take turns using the some poor woman. She says it’s a great honor, but very tiring.”

  “And you think that’s what’s happening to Ben? Some ninth-century Viking just borrows him every now and then to run around in Barton Park?” The words were mocking, but the way she sat watching him was not.

  Farrell shook his head. “I did at first, I guess because that’s the only kind of possession you ever hear about. Now I don’t know.” He hesitated, remembering the words that had been all but lost in Briseis’ terrible crying, and added, “It’s not what Sia thinks.”

  Julie drew breath to speak and then didn’t. Her thumbnails were scraping at each other again. “Well, you’ll have to bring me over there for dinner sometime,” she said at last. “Sounds like quite a crowd.”

  Farrell looked at his watch. “Dinner. Point E. High-level conference to be continued over sashimi and sake at the Half-Moon House. Say amen, and let’s boogie.”

  But she was already turning her chair around again, rotating the drawing to sketch the retina from another angle. “Joe, I can’t go anywhere, I’m going to be up all night with this stuff. Call me tomorrow.”

  “I’ll cook,” Farrell said. He found himself childishly reluctant to leave her in the quiet, warm clutter of her workroom and walk out into aimless twilight with his mind still bustling with shadows. “You’ve got that fish in the refrigerator, I’ll make lemon fillets. Just work, don’t worry about it. Lemon fillets, nice orange and onion salad, I fix. You got any real garlic?”

  Julie stood up and came to him, putting her hands in his hair. “Baby, go home,” she said gently. “This is what I do. I’m not hungry and I like working at night and I really have trouble working with anyone in the house. It’s getting to be a problem with men.”

  “Never used to be a problem.” The sound of his own complaining voice fed his strange fretfulness back on itself. “The first time I ever saw you, you were painting a still life in the middle of a party. In the kitchen, by God—people rampaging in and out, necking, fixing drinks, something going on the stove, smelling like a home urinalysis, and you eating an apple, painting away, not paying no mind to nothing. You remember that? I think I was looking for the paper towels. A whole bunch of paper towels.”

  “I was eighteen years old, what did I know?” Julie said. “Go home, Joe. This is what I do now. The drawings have to be ready tomorrow morning, because somebody needs them. The Lady Murasaki, that scared, show-offy girl you want back, she’s for weekends, special occasions, whenever I need her.” She kissed him then, biting his lower lip and shaking her head slightly. “I still do,” she said, “once in a while. Maybe it’s the same way with Ben.”

  Farrell asked, “What about Ben? I have to talk to him, I have to do something about Ben. What the hell do you think I should do?” For a moment Julie’s hands tightened on the back of his neck, cool as new leaves, but holding him hard enough that he could feel the smooth callouses on the sides of her drawing fingers. But she only said, “Call me at work,” and kissed him again, and—as neatly as Sia ever hemmed his memory or Nicholas Bonner made time clear its throat—they were smiling through her screen door; but he turned away first, never knowing how long she leaned against the door afterward, and a pair of early stars were pricking into view above the Waverly as he sat in Madame Schumann-Heink, wishing he were just arriving at Julie’s house and wondering what to say to Ben. I can’t go back there until I think of something.

  Eventually he drove away from the university streets, down below Gould, past the freeway, almost as far as the Bay, to eat ribs and sausages hot enough to cause double vision and cauterize polyps, in a diner slightly bigger than a camper truck. The decor was the same as in his student days—framed railroad timetables and signed photographs of almost-familiar singing groups—and the sour-tempered daughters of the sour-tempered black couple he remembered were still yelling at each other in the kitchen. Farrell found this immensely comforting and overate out of several kinds of hunger.

  Standing outside the door, breathing carefully to test his charred sinuses, he heard a rough, friendly voice, sounding almost at his ear: “Hey there, old Knight of Ghosts and Shadows.” Farrell turned and saw the man he knew as the Saracen Hamid ibn Shanfara crossing the street toward him, in company with Lovita Bird and two of the musicians from the King’s Birthday Revels. One was tall, with long, thinning brown hair and the bovinely enduring expression of a Flemish St. Anthony; the other looked like a happy satyr, redbearded and bowlegged. They bowed formally to Farrell, there in the tarnished light of the rib joint, as Hamid made introductions. “This is Messer Matteo dei Servi, and this here now mauvais sujet and generally worthless type is Brother Felix Arabia.” Farrell bowed back and asked them whither they were bound.

  “Armed combat class,” Hamid answered cheerfully. “Come on along with us. Nothing on public TV tonight except cooking and dog-walking, anyway.”

  “Armed combat,” Farrell said. “As in clash of broadsword on buckler. Shivering of lances. Yield thee, caitiff.”

  The satyr Felix Arabia grinned at him. “Thursday nights, seve
n-thirty. Best show in town, for the money.” He cocked his rowdy head at the saint. “He’s serious about it, he’s teacher’s pet, just about. Hamid and Lovita and me, we’re not really in the class, we’re just his occasional cheerleaders. Groupies.” He made a baton-twirling gesture, which somehow contained the hard twinkle of an invisible sword.

  Farrell found that he was walking with them, Lovita Bird’s arm through his and Matteo dei Servi saying shyly, “Actually, I’m not that good, not enough time to practice. I think of it like a discipline, like a philosophy. It’s great for my concentration.” The long, cumbersome bundle that he and Felix took turns carrying kept nudging Farrell’s side coldly, like an inquisitive shark.

  Farrell asked, “Who teaches this stuff? Where on earth do you find people who know about medieval fighting techniques?” Felix Arabia looked mildly surprised. “Man, everybody in Avicenna is insanely knowledgeable about something. Especially fighting. Any kind of combat master you want—armed, unarmed—they’re all over the place these days. Like wandering samurai in Kurosawa movies.”

  “Lute players, now,” Matteo dei Servi said. “Lute players are tricky to find. Good lute players.”

  Felix Arabia said, “Speaking of which,” and for the rest of the way they took turns urgently coaxing Farrell to join their consort Basilisk. When he pointed out that he could only play one instrument well, while the rest of the group—except for the Lady Criseyde, their percussionist—were clearly at home with half a dozen, he was reassured by Felix, “Listen, we don’t need any more damn sackbuts and serpentines, but we have got to have a lute.”

  And Matteo said, “People expect a lute, anything older than Mozart, they just do. We’re starting to play a lot of non-League jobs around town, and they always ask.”