The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  Briseis surprised him greatly by leading him on his favorite path, down behind the bear cages. Unpaved, too narrow for trucks or the alligator train, it was used more as a shortcut by the zoo staff than by visitors. Farrell liked it for its rough coolness and silence, and for the smell of the bears in the shadows. Briseis was waiting for him at a bend where the path broadened briefly to make room for a low stone fountain, which had become a birdbath by default long ago. The tiny silver hiccup of the water was the only sound Farrell could hear, except for Briseis’ deep panting.

  Ben’s own breath was so shallow as to be inaudible in the clearing. He was hunched over the fountain, propping himself with his hands in the concrete bowl, his head sunken and turned away, like an animal too sick to drink. Farrell recognized his suit first—the shabby gray corduroy that Ben treasured obstinately for the elbow-patched stereotype it was and wore to work whenever Sia got up too late to protest. Except for the water-soaked cuffs, the coat was unstained, and the rucked-up shirt, missing three buttons, still showed the dry-cleaner’s creases. But what was inside the familiar clothes was not Farrell’s friend. He knew that before he saw the face, even before the alien flesh, rigid beyond bearing, howled under his hand. He said, “Ben,” to it anyway, because he could not make himself call it by the other name.

  The stranger replied in a voice that was higher and sharper than Ben’s voice, speaking words like the rattling of oarlocks and anchor chains. It was the voice Farrell had heard outside Sia’s door on the night when Ben came home, the same voice that had chanted Norse battle songs or nursery rhymes while she and Nicholas confronted each other across their ravaged battlefield, Aiffe. But then Ben—Egil, Egil Eyvindsson, say it in your head at least—had been hurt, helpless, unable to stand, or to do much else but glare through Ben’s eyes like a madman through steel mesh, monstrously afraid. Now he was facing Farrell with two feet of bird-limed concrete and rusty water between them, testing his strength against the boundaries of this body, making it move. The little, dim scar was stretched dark, and a grin had begun to dance on the clenched mouth, fire along a knife blade. Farrell was afraid for his life then, but he kept his hand on the stranger’s arm, for no reason he could ever name, and felt the creature trembling in slow, aching, hideous waves. He held on tight, letting the terrible shivering pass into him.

  There is not a chance in that world that you would have known what to do, Sia said. Farrell glanced quickly around for Briseis, but the dog was gone. The stranger was speaking to him directly now; it sounded savagely questioning, probably something about my executor, or which afterlife program I’m signed up for. He fell back on his oldest schoolyard gambit, a shrugging, smiling face meant to indicate simultaneous incomprehension and absolute agreement, combined with utter nonaggressiveness. He had never known it to fail, except with Lidia Mirabal’s boyfriend Paco, and with Julie.

  The next thing he was sure about was being on the ground, unable to breathe. A raging, hammering weight was aboard him, a crowbar forearm crushed his throat, and a sound like trees splitting in a great storm was going on somewhere quite near. Dazed, frantic, he got a knee up into the center of the sound, and the strangling pressure eased slightly. As loudly as he could under the circumstances, he yelled, “Ben!”

  A hand scrabbled over his face, feeling for his eyes. Farrell knocked it away, grabbing out wildly himself. His mouth and nostrils were full of musty corduroy, and he felt as though Mr. Ngugi were using him for a fly-switch, but he dug and twisted and worried, still coughing Ben’s name, until the stranger grunted and reared up astride him. The wide, rather flashy green tie, the one I gave him for his birthday, dangled askew, yanked loose from the torn collar into a knot the size and shape of a Brazil nut, surely never to be undone again. Absurdly, the tie terrified Farrell completely, in a place where the insane assault itself could not go, but it also wrenched him at last to understanding. Poor sonofabitch couldn’t get it off, just panicked. Must have thought it was witchcraft, a curse, poor sonofabitch.

  “Egil, goddamn it!” he cried, but the berserker only mumbled to himself, turning his head to left and right. Farrell saw where he was looking, heaved wildly with the free upper half of his body, and lunged for the stone lying between two redwood roots. His hand closed on it, but the other took it away from him, almost gently, poising it over him, cocking it so far back that it disappeared behind the corduroy shoulder. Raising his own arms to ward it off, he shouted his old high-school nickname for Ben straight into this empty and blazing hero’s face. “Rubberlips! Hey, Rubberlips!”

  The stone faltered, started down again, then hung in the air, quaking daintily, like a wind chime. Farrell said, “Rubberlips?” and saw the face begin to buckle and slip, melting into the face of their childhood, soft and wise and secret, the scar dissolving like a star at sunrise. Farrell closed his eyes, out of pity and a kind of numbing propriety—I shouldn’t see this, it’s not right—but even then, he felt Ben’s return to the body that still pinioned him, in the same way that he could always feel morning moving up across his blankets, warming his dreams.

  “Joe.” The voice was small and parched.

  A root was grinding into Farrell’s back, and he became aware of sweat sliding out of his hair, delicately maddening as fly feet. He sat up as Ben got clumsily off him, swiped at his forehead, and said mildly, “Seizures, my ass.”

  In the same unfamiliar voice, Ben said, “I’m sorry.” Farrell had begun to brush off his uniform, but found himself tidying Ben’s torn, dusty clothes, even trying to do something about the hopelessly jammed tie. “Could have goddamn killed me,” he said, muttering like an irritated nanny as he worked. “Seizures. He could have goddamn killed me.”

  “He didn’t know you,” Ben said. “Egil doesn’t know anybody in this world. Except Sia.” Now, suddenly, he was insubstantial, a figure of slowly pulsing ash; the wild power out of time that had answered Farrell’s touch a few minutes before seemed to have abandoned Ben completely, taking the marrow of his bones away with it.

  Farrell said, “This is Tuesday. You’ve got a one o’clock class.”

  “I do? How’m I doing?” It was the punch line of an ancient vaudeville joke, as much a part of their shared history as music or the Staff Suit they had taken turns wearing on dates long ago. Ben said, “I think I was looking for you. I never remember. How did you find me?”

  Farrell told him, and he nodded. “You figure it out about Briseis yet?” He appeared to take silence for affirmation. “Sia used to have griffins for her familiars—panthers, phoenixes. Hell of a comedown to a hysterical dog with a morale problem, but Briseis does all right. In the house, she’s just a hassock with fleas—outside, she’s Sia’s eyes and legs, more than that sometimes. Old Briseis. I belong to Sia, like her, and she has to help me, but she is scared absolutely shitless of Egil. Makes things hard for her, poor old bunny.”

  Farrell came across the forgotten bag of peanuts in his pocket and offered them diffidently. Ben tore the bag out of his hands and then tried very hard to eat the peanuts slowly. Farrell said, “Jesus. Wait, I’ve got some more loose ones somewhere.”

  Ben looked up when the peanuts were gone, saw Farrell watching him, and smiled amost cheerfully. He said, “Egil will not eat in this world. One of those things you never anticipate.”

  “I’ll buy you lunch,” Farrell said. “We have a cafeteria, everyone calls it the Elephants’ Graveyard.”

  But Ben shook his head, saying, “No, let’s walk. Please, let’s just walk a little.”

  Farrell put an arm around his shoulder, and for an instant Ben rested totally against him, making Farrell remember how the boy Joshua had slept in Nicholas Bonner’s arms.

  They walked very slowly back up the path, which vanished under candy wrappers after it circled past the bear cages. Farrell matched his pace to Ben’s sidelong caution, and they moved among the baby carriages, the elderly couples, the school children harried into double lines behind their teachers, and the bright figures o
f older children, only half-tame, darting and patrolling like flights of tropical fish; they spoke hesitantly of dissertations, grants, departmental chairmanships and the transmigration of souls. Three boys were daring each other into leaning further and further out over the moat around the lion yard, and Farrell chased them away.

  Ben said, “He’s real. That’s the main thing. Egil is a real person, right now. He lives in Norway, near a real place called Hamar, and he has a wife named Ingeborg, three children, a younger brother who lives with them, five thralls—okay, slaves—four oxen, four horses, a bunch of truly nasty dogs—”

  Farrell interrupted him, resolutely ignoring his use of the present tense. “What time are we talking about? When is all this supposed to have happened?”

  “Oh, late ninth century, by the clothing and the talk.” The unmistakable teaching lilt was coming into Ben’s voice. “They speak of Harald Fairhair as though he were the undisputed king, so it’s since the Battle of Hafrsfjord, whenever that really was. Iceland’s being settled, and the Danes are all over the Mediterranean. A lot of Egil’s people are teaming up with the Danes now, with Scotland and Ireland and the Orkneys pretty well picked clean. Make it 880, around there.”

  They were in the aviary, standing before the battered, sinister grandeur of the marabou stork and the king vulture. Farrell had guided them there deliberately, because his supervisor was allergic to birds and rarely came near the building. Ben went on, “He owns his land, maybe a hundred acres, maybe a little less. It’s thin soil, but Egil works hard, and he’s pretty well off, probably the richest man in the area in terms of real wealth, except for the Jarl, the local lord. Fortunately, he gets on well with the Jarl, they’ve been friends since they were boys. They usually go viking together, after the harvest’s in—it’s almost a joint command by now. He’s about thirty-eight, thirty-nine. He’s a very good woodcarver.”

  Farrell thought of Sia in the living room and of the blind woman being lured from the tree under the stroking of her knife. He said, “This is the one you did your thesis on. I remember you wrote to me.”

  “No, that was the Jarl himself. See, the Jarl of Hamar is already sort of half-legendary, even in 880.” Ben was patting Farrell’s shoulder unconsciously in little hard dabs of his bunched fingers, as he always did when he was explaining something. “He was one of Harold Fairhair’s first allies, him and the Jarl of Lade, and there’s just a lot known about him because he’s forever getting involved in politics—wars, plots, back-room deals, insurrections, the works. A really turbulent scoundrel, but people like him. The skalds keep writing new poems and songs about him.”

  He grinned at Farrell’s look. “Joe, I can’t help it, I have to talk like that. He’s alive, that amazing no-good, this minute, living his crazy life, double-crossing and flimflamming for the pure pleasure of it, for the game, world without end. I wish to God I could write that thesis again. I thought he was dead, and it makes a difference.”

  Farrell saw the marabou stork coming toward them, pacing softly, full of a carrion-eater’s mincing exaltation. The stained white down of its underbody was molting, and lichenous tufts clung to the great peeling beak—arms of lawn furniture, left outside all winter—and to the swollen pink pouch, veined and soft as a testicle. It had astonishingly sweet brown eyes, set in a tiny, naked, pimpled red head like an elbow.

  Ben said, “But nobody writes songs or anything else about Egil. I’ve never read a word, there’s not a single reference, I had to find everything out from him. Egil’s not very glamorous, not theatrical; he’s just a farmer, starting to lose his hair, doesn’t give more of a damn that he can help about current events. He goes off raiding with the Jarl most years because it’s a change from harvesting rocks and trees and there’s more profit in it. Like most people. He knows a lot of poems by heart and everything about the weather and a whole lot of little games, like children’s games, with stones and string.”

  “And he can’t swim,” Farrell whispered, remembering Ben’s instants of sudden dreadful terror in the pool. Ben nodded. “That’s right, he can’t swim a lick—still tends to get seasick, as a matter of fact. He’s good with horses, though, and he’s a born fighter, a natural, better than the Jarl himself.” He gave a harsh chuckle, startling the stork. It thrust out its ghastly head and made a sound like sizzling grease.

  “How do you know he’s losing his hair?” Farrell asked. The warm wind had shifted slightly, upsetting the smaller birds, who began to blow around their enclosures in clumsy, stuttering gusts. Ben said, “I can see it sometimes. In the mirror.”

  He was almost chattering as they walked on. “Actually, Egil’s had a wild life himself, in his own grumbly farmer way. Did I tell you that he was a slave in Morocco for three years? Married there, had a child, got away when a bunch of Danes came raiding. And he was at Hafrsfjord, and some berserker type put a spear right through him—touched the stomach and went out under the shoulder blade, judging by the scar. He saw a sea serpent once, a kraken, off the Faroes. It had a goat’s head, and it stank like a dead whale.”

  “What happened to his family in Morocco? Did he ever find them again?” But Ben did not hear him. He was rubbing his throat, tugging hard at the skin. “Joe, you don’t know, you can’t imagine. The smells, the darkness under the trees. They sing a lot, people sound right on the edge of singing all the time. The weather, my God, you hear birds bumping down the roof all night long, frozen dead. I don’t think they have weather like that anymore, anywhere, or darkness.”

  A child running by kicked Farrell’s ankle and anointed him with something greenish and wettish. Stopping to wipe his pants leg, he asked, trying to keep his voice gruffly neutral, “What happens? How do you call him, reach him, whatever it is you do? Can you control it?” Ben did not answer or look at him. Farrell let it go until they had nearly reached the Cape hunting dogs’ yard; then he burst out, “You don’t control him. He comes by himself, am I right? I’m right. Seizures. More like late-period Dr. Jekyll, that’s what it’s goddamn like.” He had not realized how angry he was, nor how profoundly shaken, until he heard his own voice.

  Ben turned to face him at last, arms wrapped around his body as if against some dismembering cold beyond even Egil Eyvindsson’s understanding. Nicholas would know. Nicholas Bonner knows about cold.

  “It’s not that simple.” Farrell could barely hear him, but the dogs broke their endless trotting round and ran close to stare, blotchy tongues dripping out of bat faces. Ben said, “He can’t control it, either. He doesn’t come because he wants to come.”

  “A civil liberties issue,” Farrell said. His ribs were beginning to feel badly bruised, and his head ached. He said, “Tell me what happens.”

  The answer was quiet and clear, curiously formal. “I love him, Joe. What happens between us is an exchange, like love. He’s alive in his world, exactly as I am in mine. We found a way to trade times, for ten seconds, five minutes, half a day, two days. It’s just gotten a bit out of hand, that’s all. Like love.”

  A keeper whom Farrell liked passed by, calling to him what the vet had decided about the rhinoceros’s arthritic hind leg. Ben laughed suddenly, the shuddering whine of a saw seized up in damp wood. “Or maybe it’s like the Groucho Marx line, how he’s got Bright’s disease and Bright’s got his.” He seemed to want to touch Farrell, but could not let go of himself for more than a moment. “Joe, nobody knows anything about being a ninth-century Viking, nobody but me. I mean, how could they? They know the damn verse forms, they know dates, kings, funeral rituals, all the people the Danes or the Jutes beat up on. But there is nobody else, nobody in the world, who can tell you a Viking joke. Just me, do you realize that? You want to hear one now?”

  “If it’s about the two Swedes, I’ve already heard it,” Farrell said wearily. “I want you to tell me where you go, how you get there, what it feels like when you’re there.” He glanced at his watch and added, “And I think you should do it fairly quickly, because I have to go drive my li
ttle green train.” Even my armpits hurt. I am too old for this, too old for everything.

  Ben said, “Bright’s disease.” He laughed again, in the old way this time, struggling not to. “Joe, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m swarming with memories that aren’t mine. Those peanuts you gave me, I ate them here, but I tasted them in another time. Somebody tasted them.” Farrell actually felt his jaw drop, which was a new experience. “Things taste so different there, Joe; the light’s all different, the constellations, the facial expressions—even whistling sounds different, for God’s sake. Feelings. People don’t dream the way we do, nothing like us, nothing.” His voice was level enough, but his teeth were chattering. He said, “I have his dreams sometimes. I can’t wake up from those by myself. If Sia weren’t there, I’d never wake up. Nobody would know.”

  “Is anybody there for Egil? When he dreams you?” Ben blinked and frowned as if he had not heard the question. Farrell said, “Technique, that’s what I want. Procedure. Do you say Shazam, do you drink something really vile, do you just stand still by yourself and think about Egil in a special way? Tell me, Ben.”

  The Cape dogs danced hotly against the bars, whining with grim urgency. They smelled to Farrell of blood and horse dung and chocolate, and he wondered whether they could sense Egil, if only as a wrongness, a constant disquieting shiver in their wild logic. Ben stared back at them silently. Farrell saw his supervisor tacking shyly toward them by way of trash-can inspections. “The League. Is that the way it started, being Egil in the League? Is that the connection?”