The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  “Paying gigs?”

  Felix and Matteo nodded eagerly. Hamid chuckled, and Lovita squeezed Farrell’s arm, saying, “I’m his agent.”

  Farrell said, “We’ll talk.”

  The combat master lived in a fat, battered Victorian at the end of a torn-up street, isolated on three sides by construction moonscapes and on the fourth by a half-completed freeway tributary, so that the effect was of a ruinous old molar clinging on in a skeletal jaw. The front door was open, and Farrell’s companions led him into a high, cold room, empty of all furnishing or decoration, save for the rubbings and engravings of weapons and armor pinned to the walls. Five men, dressed alike in padded ski clothing, including boots and heavy gloves, were moving stiffly to stand before a goat-bearded little man in a blue polo shirt and faded chinos. When he turned to nod curtly to the newcomers, Farrell saw that his eyes were a bright yellow-gray, an African parrot’s eyes.

  Two of the students wore conventional saber masks; two others had on motorcycle helmets with tinted bubble face guards. The face of the fifth man—a slighter figure than the rest, as far as Farrell could judge through the quilted jacket—was entirely hidden under a steel helmet like an upsidedown carafe, the lip of which extended down to cover the wearer’s neck. Where the handle should have been, the pointed visor jutted out, bucktoothed and blank. There were slits in the visor, but Farrell could see nothing through them.

  Lovita nudged him, whispering, “Your Lady Murasaki, she made that one. Big old thing weighs more than she does.” The five men were now ranged before the combat master, peering warily at him over the painted shields on their arms. All but one of the shields were kite-shaped and wooden, four feet or more in length; the lone exception, shaped like a flatiron and obviously as faithfully ponderous as the steel helmet, belonged to the same slender man, whose limbs appeared almost too frail to support the rigors of authenticity. Farrell asked Hamid, “Did she make the shield too?”

  The Saracen shook his head. “Henryk Tourneysmith made it last year for William the Dubious. William must have gotten tired of dragging it around.”

  Matteo dei Servi had unwrapped his bundle of medieval paraphernalia and was changing clothes hurriedly as the little instructor moved nimbly among his padded pupils, sharply tapping a bent arm to bring a shield up to nose height, gripping and turning a shoulder until it made a right angle with the shield. “Bend your knees, I pray you, sweet lordlings. We have spoken of this before.” He had a dry, hot voice, rich with impatience. “Right hand on the hip to keep the shoulders straight.” He walked around the man with the steel helmet and shield and nudged him vigorously behind the knee. “Feet flat, knees right out over the toes. Ought to be like sitting in a rocking chair by now.” The man staggered and seemed for a moment about to crumple. The combat master said, “If you were properly balanced, I couldn’t do that,” and went on to correct the next student.

  Hamid said softly to Farrell, “His name is John Erne. He’s been doing this for years, and it is the only connection he has with the League. Doesn’t dance, doesn’t feast, doesn’t take part in anything but this. He won’t even fight in the tournaments anymore.”

  “What does he do the rest of the time?”

  Hamid shrugged. “No idea. Man could be a dealer, man could be running a day-care center. I think he’s a closet investment counselor, but I can’t prove it.”

  The combat master now chose a sword from several leaning in a corner—all made of planed and shaped rattan—and stood gazing abstractedly at the six men, letting the wooden blade rest on the palm of his left hand. Abruptly he swung the sword up and far back behind his shoulders, took two odd, spraddling steps forward, and struck with all his strength at the nearest man’s head. Farrell caught his breath; but the student’s shield came up to take the blow, which rattled the shield back into his face. The combat master immediately cocked his arm again for a savage cut at the student’s legs; when the swiftly lowered shield turned the blade once more, he aimed another stroke at the helmet and followed it with one to the exposed side. The student intercepted the latter attack, but moved his shield out of the perpendicular to do so, and the master promptly whipped his sword through a backhanded slash to catch the opposite leg just above the knee. The leg buckled, and the student gasped, dropping his guard to clutch himself.

  “Up and down,” the little master said coldly. “The shield moves only up and down, my gentlemen.” Without another word, he leaped at the next man in line—Matteo dei Servi—battering the edges of his shield with a wild drumfire of circling overhand blows. The shield jumped and twisted, dragging at Matteo’s arm as he struggled to deflect the onslaught, but he managed to keep it from being driven to either side, and the rattan sword never touched his body. The master stalked on, a goateed golem in a polo shirt, smashing at the shields with a mechanical fury as they presented themselves—skinny arms swarming tirelessly, bunchy body almost coming off the floor with each blow. The cold room clacked like a windmill.

  When he came to the slender man in the huge carafe-helmet, the combat master paused for a moment, his lined, slanting face seeming to hold pity uncomfortably. He struck twice, lightly, pushing the steel shield from side to side, then said something that Farrell could not hear. The student shook his head without answering and raised the shield to a defensive position again. The master sighed, and the rattan sword tinkled and tolled crazily on the painted steel. It was impossible for the slender man to move the shield quickly; he managed to block a surprising number of the strokes, but the rest went home on his body and legs, making a sound like pine sap exploding in a fire. He never flinched, but Farrell did.

  The combat master stepped back and lowered his sword. “Ten minutes.” He turned abruptly toward Farrell, Hamid, Lovita, and Felix Arabia, walking with the powerful nearwaddle of a ballet dancer. When he hunkered down by them, leaning on the sword for support—a Roman campaigner squinting over the tumbled twilight ravines of Pictish country—he might have been thirty-five years old or sixty. His skin and his sweat-stiffened collar-length hair were the same anonymous color, somewhere between smoke and sand. Hamid said, “John Erne, the Knight of Ghosts and Shadows.”

  John Erne extended his hand, smiling quickly. “Another musician? Yes, of course.” His round, shallow eyes went over Farrell’s body as if it were a car on the grease rack.

  Farrell asked, “How do you know? Just because I came in with musicians?”

  “Well, that,” John Erne said. “But mostly because you flinched so, every time I came near hitting somebody’s hand.” He held his own hands out in front of him, palms down, amusedly regarding their pale-furred backs. The knuckles lumped up like Turk’s-head knots, even with the hands open, and two nails on the right hand were black and crisp. “I average about a finger a year so far,” he said thoughtfully. “Broke a whole hand the spring before last, in a mêlée.” His hands were smaller than Farrell’s.

  The combat students had taken off their helmets and were leaning against the wall, standing and sitting, all breathing with their mouths open. They all appeared to be in their late teens, except for Matteo dei Servi and the slender man, who sat by himself, bowed over the steel helmet in his lap. When he looked up, Farrell saw that he was Japanese.

  Felix Arabia protested, “We don’t all worry about our hands.” He nodded toward Matteo, already practicing feints and countermoves with his shield. “Look at him, he’s ready. Come the next Whalemas Tourney, he’s going to be out there pounding on anything that moves.” Matteo looked over toward them and grinned like a summer-camp photograph.

  John Erne chuckled unmaliciously, turning away to check the wrappings of his sword hilt. “He won’t, you know.” Farrell noticed that his teeth were odd sizes—an assortment rather than a set—and that his nose had been broken at least once.

  “Musicians have to practice,” John Erne said. “I never met a real musician who wasn’t a miser with himself. They’ll never come all the way with you anywhere.” Farrell stared at him,
and the combat master went on, “They know how to learn things. Your friend there, I’ll teach him how to do a weapons pass, or how to use his shield in close work, and he’ll pick it up faster than the rest of the class, because he’s accustomed to thinking about technique. But frankly, I wish he wouldn’t bother with it. He’ll just be learning how to do something; the better he gets, the more I’ll get angry, and he’ll never understand why. I really wish he wouldn’t bother.”

  “My goodness,” Farrell said slowly. He felt himself smiling, thinking of Julie. He said, “You’re like me.”

  The flat yellow gaze considered him more reflectively this time. “Am I? I don’t have any room for more than the one seriousness, if that’s what you mean.” He shrugged gracefully, rolling his beard between two fingers. “I’ve had a local reputation for a long time as a sort of knowledgeable nut. People invite me to their history classes, and I give demonstrations and talk about extinct attitudes. I talk about chivalry, honor, prouesse, and playing by the rules, and I watch their skins crawl.”

  Farrell was startled to feel his own skin stir with the words. Hamid said easily, “Well, you make them real edgy, John. This is Avicenna, they just like theoretical violence, rebels in Paraguay blowing up bad folks they don’t know. They like the Middle Ages the same way, with the uncool stuff left out. But you scare them, you’re like a pterodactyl flapping around the classroom, screaming and shitting. Too real.” The round eyes seemed to flick without closing, as parrots’ eyes do.

  “A dinosaur. You think so?” John Erne laughed—a rattle of the nostrils, no more. “This is my time.” He leaned forward and patted Farrell’s knee hard. “This is the time of weapons. It isn’t so much the fact that everyone has a gun—it’s that everyone wants to be one. People want to turn themselves into guns, knives, plastic bombs, big dogs. This is the time when ten new karate studios open every day, when they teach you Kung Fu in the third grade, and Whistler’s mother has a black belt in aikido. I know one fellow on a little side street who’s making a fortune with savate, that French kick-boxing.” Farrell watched the combat master’s face, still trying to determine how old he was. He appeared most youthful when he moved or spoke, oldest when he smiled.

  “The myriad arts of self-defense,” John Erne said. “They’re all just in it because of the muggers, you understand, or the police, or the Zen of it all. But no new weapon ever goes unused for long. Pretty soon the streets will be charged with people, millions of them, all loaded and cocked and frantically waiting for somebody to pull their trigger. And one man will do it—bump into another man or look at him sideways and set it all off.” He opened one hand and blew across his palm as if he were scattering dandelion fluff. “The air will be so full of killer reflexes and ancient disabling techniques there’ll be a blue haze over everything. You won’t hear a single sound, except the entire population of the United States chopping at one another with the edges of their hands.”

  Farrell asked quietly, “Where does that leave chivalry?”

  Matteo dei Servi and another student had begun to work out with their swords and shields, circling each other with the peculiar hitching stride that the combat master had employed. They carried the rattan blades well back and almost horizontal, at helmet height, and they struck over the tops of their shields in the rhythm of fencers, turn and turn about. John Erne snapped his fingernails sharply against his own sword as he watched them.

  “A dead art form,” he said, “like lute music. As unnatural to the animal as opera or ballet, and yet nobody who puts on even cardboard armor can quite escape it—any more than you can escape the fact that your music believes in God and hell and the King. You and I are what they used to call witnesses, vouching with our lives for something we never saw. The bitch of it is, all we ever wanted to be was experts.”

  Abruptly he turned his head and called to the two warily parrying students, “Single-time now!” They faltered for a moment; then the tempo of their fighting doubled, each man guarding against a cut as he delivered one. John Erne said, “There can’t be a dozen fighters in the League who haven’t been through this room. I have trained men to use the broadsword, greatsword, dagger and buckler, maul, flail, mace, the halberd, and the war axe. Some of my students could survive now if you dropped them back into Visigoth Spain or the Crusades.”

  “So long as they didn’t drink anything,” Farrell said, and Lovita Bird added almost simultaneously, “Long as they could bring their cassette players.”

  The combat master looked at them without answering. Matteo’s adversary aimed a sweeping forehand slash at his head, but Matteo caught it on his shield and moved in to strike where the man’s shield had swung away from the body to counterbalance the roundhouse blow. It sounded like someone jumping on a mattress. The student coughed and bent forward slightly.

  John Erne called, “You are less by a leg, Squire Martin.” The young man stepped back, turning a gasping, angry face toward the three watchers. “It wouldn’t have cut through the armor. It has to cut armor.”

  “Nay, of us two, who’s to be the judge of steel?” John Erne replied mildly. “You’re down a leg, Martin.”

  The student shrugged and lowered himself to one knee, slow in the thick clothing. He crouched behind his shield, exposing nothing but his sword arm. Farrell expected Matteo to strike at that, but he chose to attack over the shield, punching blindly for the tucked-down head and almost compelling the kneeling man to cut at his shoulder. John Erne sighed faintly.

  There was no need for him to call a wound; Matteo immediately dropped his shield, switched his sword from right hand to left, and came on more cautiously, trying to take advantage of his foe’s limited reach. But he was carrying the sword too high against a crouching opponent; when the logical swipe at his legs came, he had to jump back and launch the return blow while still off-balance. The effort brought his head down within range of a desperate lunge and strike, as his own sword whacked home on Squire Martin’s motorcycle helmet. John Erne shouted furiously, “Double kill!” and both fighters collapsed in proper style, rolling pitifully onto their backs. Martin, his faceguard knocked loose, rubbed at his runny nose.

  “Dear God,” John Erne murmured. He stood up, twiddling his beard again. The ropy, boyish body had not slackened for an instant of the conversation.

  Hamid said, “John. Tell the man why you won’t have anything to do with the League. You could have taken the whole thing over long ago.”

  The parrot gaze moved from him to Farrell and back again, the face remaining as serene as a clock’s face. “I have a better League here,” John Erne said. He tapped his forehead just above the tail of one spiky eyebrow. “I like mine much better.”

  Farrell watched him walk back to his students, eyes down, feet a bit pigeon-toed. The splotched polo shirt clung to his protuberant shoulder blades. He nodded the two fallen fighters to their feet and confronted the half circle of masked boys. Lovita Bird said, “That man is seriously crazy.”

  Hamid folded his long legs under him and leaned back against the wall, his chestnut eyes looking very far away. “Might be this is what keeps him sane.”

  “It’s strange,” John Erne was saying. “The one thing I really know about broadsword fighting you’ll all have to learn from someone else. The first man you face in the Whalemas Tourney will teach you that it’s very important to use your shield well and also that you don’t know how. You’ve gotten good enough with the sword, all of you, but your idea of shield work is peeking around an ironing board.” He sighed and shrugged, twisting his mouth. “One reason I try to avoid watching my students fight.”

  A large, blond boy with a swagbelly like a laundry bag spoke up. “Sir Fortinbras—the one I’m supposed to be squire to—says a shield ought to be as big and light as you can manage it. Without making it so light it splits right off.”

  “Sir Fortinbras hasn’t improved as a fighter in three years, for just that reason,” John Erne replied calmly. “No more has Raoul of Carcassonne or
Simon Widefarer. Those kite shields they all use were made for men on horseback—they’re pathetic things to be dragging around in close work. They blind you exactly as much as they protect you, they throw your balance off just horribly, and they stop your technique right where it is. I could go through a field of those things with a butter knife. Foolishness.”

  He jerked a forefinger at the Japanese student, who was scowling avidly at him over his folded arms. “Most of you probably feel a bit superior to the Ronin Benkei, watching him struggling with that manhole cover of his all this time. But the Ronin Benkei dances with his shield, very old dances of attack and defense called katas. He tells me that he does it twice a day. Can anyone here do that? Martin? Arnuif? Orlando? Can you dance with your plywood weapons?” They shrugged, grinning. The Ronin Benkei’s expression did not change.

  “I’m embarrassed to admit that I can’t either,” John Erne said. He drew his own shield out of a frayed, green flannel bag that hung on the back of a chair. His shield was made of steel backed with leather, like the Ronin Benkei’s, but it was circular in shape and moderately convex. Two reinforcing steel bands crisscrossed it, surmounted where they met in the center by a heavy leather boss ornamented with a painted pattern of leaves and moons.

  “We’re going to go on to the weapons pass,” John Erne announced. “The idea of the pass—unlike the overrun, which, as we know, is nothing much but crashing into your man in hopes of knocking him off balance—is to open up the side you’re after without leaving yourself vulnerable. You’ll see a lot of clever maneuvers like these at the Whalemas Tourney. Some of them will be aimed at you, so you’d better learn how to guard against them and how to do them yourselves.” He beckoned to the boy called Squire Arnulf. “Approach and have at me.”

  Arnulf donned his saber mask, adjusted the long shield on his arm, and set himself to face the combat master. John Erne, standing indifferently straight and scuffing his feet, launched an artless, looping head cut which the boy picked off easily, raising his shield a few inches. For a moment, the shield’s arc blocked his vision; in that moment, John Erne did a stiff little dance step and rushed him, lashing like a scorpion into the sudden gap between shield edge and flailing sword as he went by. Arnulf swayed, and his sword arm rose to his featureless head. John Erne sprang back, no trace of triumph on his face, but only a puckered academic earnestness. “Now how did I do that?” he demanded.