The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  Farrell asked, “Why did you stay in the League?”

  Hamid’s control was already reasserting itself when he answered. “They needed a chronicler, and I needed something to chronicle. I had my own comfort to look after.”

  At the corner, he bade Farrell an abrupt good night, turned away, hesitated, and then added, “You know, another reason I had some trouble talking about Micah—I guess you know Julie and he were sort of an item when what happened happened.” Farrell nodded. Hamid said, “I wouldn’t take it to heart. But I’d say they do have a certain amount of unfinished business.”

  “It’s their business,” Farrell said. “That voice of yours, on the other hand, that death tomorrow, I think that’s our business. I think we should pay attention.”

  Hamid snorted. “That voice’ll say anything, it doesn’t know shit.” But his eyes were not mocking when he patted Farrell’s shoulder. “Well, we’ll pay attention, whatever we can do. That’s the thing with the damn bardic voice, it never comes with instructions you can read. Worse than useless. See you on the island.”

  Julie was sleeping soundly when Farrell let himself in, and he set her alarm clock for a three o’clock summons, sourly certain that she had spent the evening in Micah Willows’ hospital room. But when he rose from the bed, she turned over, swiftly wide awake, reaching up for him. “Have a good time,” she said. “When in doubt, just surrender. I’ll ransom you.”

  Farrell kissed her, saying, “I know it’s dumb, boys playing war games. I just want to see what it’s like one time.”

  Julie said, “Don’t apologize, for God’s sake. Just remember, not everyone there will be playing. Keep your head down.”

  She was asleep again when the armored men knocked at the door. Farrell opened it and saw William the Dubious and two others, all three cloaked from throat to ankle, but ringing softly when they moved. A van, bigger and newer than his own, stood twitching in the driveway. Farrell ducked back into the house, grabbed his lute and the mail shirt that Julie had insisted he take with him, and went outside.

  Ben was sitting in the van, dressed in full Viking battle gear, all studded leather and painted steel, with heavy arm rings and a bear-claw necklace. Only the belt-axe and horned helmet were familiar to Farrell. He was badly frightened for a moment, unsure of whom he was facing; but then Ben grinned at him and made a uniquely obscene gesture they had both learned from a Sicilian classmate, and Farrell demanded, “What the hell are you doing here? You said you didn’t go to the wars anymore.”

  “Don’t yell,” Ben said placidly. “People are sleeping. A little consideration here.”

  “You had all these papers to grade. You made such a thing out of it—a zillion papers, no time, no time, be working when you get back from the playground, Joe. Embarrassed the hell out of me for even asking you—”

  “Grading papers is boring. Wars are fun. Get in, we’ve got two other knights to pick up.”

  Farrell lurched into the seat beside him, asking, “Does Simon know? He was throwing a major hissy last night because you weren’t coming. Does Sia know?”

  Ben said, “Sia sent me to keep you out of mischief. Okay now? Shut up and put that shirt on, you’ll need it.”

  The drive to Lake Vallejo took a little more than an hour, and the sky was thinning when they parked the van near a concrete-block lavatory and walked the rest of the way down to the lakeshore. Farrell saw a dozen other cars and pickups parked among the cottonwoods and a rowboat plying toward the island, bearing four knights, their cloaks flaring in the dawn wind and their armor the color of the lake. A golden banner with two black swans on it flapped stiffly above them.

  It was no great distance to the island, but the boat went back and forth three times before it came the turn of Farrell, Ben, William, and their companions. As a result, they arrived at the plywood fortress just as Simon Widefarer was ending a passionate and furious harangue of encouragement to his drowsy, dispirited-looking troops. He broke it off and led the cheering as Ben, with Farrell following, slipped hastily into the ranks of variously caped and armored men grouped around their household banners. Farrell joined Hamid under the blazon of one Mathgamhain of Cliodhna, but Simon Widefarer took advantage of his position as captain to call Ben personally to his side. He went with odd reluctance, looking back at Farrell to say, like Julie, “Be careful. You hear me, Joe? Be really careful.”

  Mathgamhain of Cliodhna was well pleased to have both Farrell and Hamid ibn Shanfara in his service. “No lord of Ireland would go to the fighting without his bard and his harper, surely,” he said. “And can you play The Silkies in the Green Sea for us?”

  “We can fake it,” Hamid said. Simon Widefarer said loudly, “Nor is there need for any but a dunghilly poltroon to fear the girl. Twice over, both as witch and woman, is she forbidden to set foot on this island today, and it is known to every man that her power may not cross the water. Banish her from your fears, therefore, and attune your souls to victory. For Bohemond and St. Whale!”

  “That’s running water,” Farrell said softly, “not a lake,” and Hamid nodded. The last shout drew a sharp answering cheer from the knights—though not as triumphant a one as the sight of Ben had raised—and they wandered off to their assigned positions with some gaiety and swash. The sun was rising now, making their armor seem to slide like water, running crimson, ebbing into silver, eddying black. Three of the men were harmonizing zestfully on The Agincourt Carol, their strong, rough voices still clear to Farrell after they had disappeared among the alder bushes.

  “Owre kynge went forth to Normandy

  With grace and myghte of chyvalre:

  Ther God for hym wrought mervelusly

  Wherfore Englonde may calle and cry,

  ‘Deo gracias.’

  Deo gracias Anglia

  Redde pro victoria.“

  The first attackers did not appear on the opposite shore until the sun was well up. Farrell sat in a tree and watched the enemy knights climbing into half a dozen rowboats and being pushed off toward the island by their barelegged squires. The sunlight on their plumes and visors made them into faceless, fire-headed beings—torch-arrows at the string. Farrell called to Hamid waiting below, “Twenty-six, I make it,” and Hamid turned away to report the count of Mathgamhain’s lieutenant.

  The boats angled away from each other, two aiming for each of the accessible landings. Farrell had meant to begin staying out of the way, as he felt became an unarmed musician, at the first sight of Garth’s forces; but he retreated only a little way as the boats drew in, taking shelter behind the first and slightest barbican, no more than a shoulderhigh plywood windbreak tacked hurriedly across a couple of trees. Three knights already crouched there, their helmets beside them on the ground, and each man held a bow. Farrell noticed that two of the bows were wooden, expertly crafted, while the other was of fiberglass, with a sighting device and a rest for the arrow. But it was a knight with a wooden bow who was chewing bubble gum.

  Under their motionless gaze, two boatloads of the raiders glided through the gap in Garth’s barrier reef to beach among vines. Farrell heard the oarlocks clanking and the boats’ bottoms grinding thickly on the shore. The knights began to scramble out, moving awkwardly, shields held high before them. Several had their swords out as well, and most carried flail-crowned maces—the morgensterns—tucked into their belts, the studded heads dangling from chains and wire cables. The heads were supposed to be built up around tennis balls, reinforced with cloth, rubber, and leather; but to Farrell’s eyes, they swung a good bit more like icy snowballs with rocks in them. He recognized the foxy brightness of their leader, Brian des Rêves, Garth’s closest crony, and heard his soft commands as the detachment pushed forward. The three waiting men chose arrows from their quivers.

  Even before they stood up together, fitting arrows and firing over the barricade almost in one motion, Brian—perhaps warned by the rattle of the quivers—had wheeled away, shouting to his knights to scatter, to get to the sides.
The blunted arrows clacked off the wooden shields, bonked when they found armor. Farrell would have expected at least five official casualties among the nine invaders, but only one man fell, struck full in—and presumably through—his gorget, and again in the side as he went down. Another knight turned back to help him, was shot in the sword arm, and lunged into the bushes, out of range. The others had vanished; Farrell could hear them shoving their armor through the wiry scrub, moving to outflank the barbican. The defending knights put down their bows and drew their rattan swords, though the undergrowth barely gave them room even to stand on guard. Farrell began thoughtfully to fall back, thinking that Lord Mathgamhain might like to hear The Silkies in the Green Sea again.

  A thin young man wearing a black shirt and black trousers pushed past him toward the knight who still lay sprawled before the barbican. He carried a clipboard of yellow paper and called loudly as he went, “Ramon of Navarra, arm wound—the MacRae, arm and leg—Olivier le Setois, arm wound—Sforza of Lombardy, slain.” The knight sat up, then got to his feet. The man in black said, “Go on over to Glendower’s Oak, you know where that is? They’ve got beer and sandwiches—check yourself off the big roster, first thing.” He turned briskly back toward the sudden clatter of swords and garbage-can racket of whirling flails that had erupted behind the barrier. Farrell, easing discreetly away into the deeper woods, got a glimpse of two defending knights standing back to back, each one assailed by at least two men. Sforza of Lombardy marched by, slain in combat and heading for neutral territory until the end of the war. He was whistling softly and snapping his fingers.

  Behind Farrell, Hamid clucked his tongue disapprovingly. “Now you see, that man is not serious. The serious ones, they lie right where they fall, all day.”

  Battle had apparently broken out on all three beachheads. Knights of Simon Widefarer’s army went leaping past Farrell, waving their swords and tangling their cloaks in the shrubbery, all hurrying to reinforce the besieged outworks. Simon’s lone semblance of a campaign plan involved the archers’ keeping off the landing parties for as long as possible, and then giving ground slowly, digging in at every fortification, until it came time for the last stand in the castle and the hope of sundown.

  Hamid ibn Shanfara strode the island tirelessly in his white robes and turban, wailing Moorish and Celtic battle songs and constantly inventing immediate rhymed accounts of events that were still going on as he chanted them. Farrell stayed closer to Mathgamhain of Cliodhna, dutifully cheering the Irish lord into every encounter, bearing messages for him and his household, and casting increasingly wistful glances at the refreshment table each time he was swept past it, That’s where I make my stand, boy. Bury me where the braunschweiger’ll wave over my grave.

  It was like being at a League tourney that went on forever, without dancing or jugglers. In a certain fashion, matters obeyed the vague rhythms of a real campaign, lurching back and forth between the various outworks and the shore, but continually breaking off for innumerable ritualized and irrelevant personal combats. All action halted in any quarter when it was shouted that Brian des Rêves was blade to blade with Olaf Holmquist, or that Raoul of Carcassonne and the Ronin Benkei, each with a sword in one hand and a cudgel in the other, were holding six knights something more than at bay in a poison-oak ravine. The rest of it was dust, prickly sweat, squatting boredom, aimless running and ducking into bushes, occasional flurries of pushing and falling down, the bustling of the black-clad referees, and eternally the idiot yells of “Yield thee, recreant!” and “To me! To me! House of the Bear, here to me!” Garth’s tactics continued to be no more imaginative than Simon Widefarer’s, but it was obvious that no one truly cared which side gained or lost ground—the fighting was all, and Farrell wondered that he should ever have expected it to be any other way.

  There was no sign or sense of Aiffe, nor of Nicholas Bonner, and Farrell found himself almost disappointed. Ben was hardly more visible than they, for all his fearsome reputation. Farrell glimpsed him now and then, at a distance, on the trailing edge of some flanking attack or mop-up maneuver; but so far he figured nowhere in Hamid’s evolving chronicle of the War of the Witch. Mathgamhain fell at midafternoon, not in battle, but of what appeared to be acute indigestion, and he was followed in quick order by four similar cases and three of sunstroke. Farrell remembered William the Dubious’ prediction and would have thought little more of this, but then the injured started coming in. Two had apparently fallen into deep pits that opened beneath their feet; three others had been knocked half-senseless by branches falling from great redwoods. Hamid, skillfully bandaging a victim, looked across him at Farrell and said, “Methinks, man.”

  “Me, too,” Farrell said. But he was hot and grubby and unable at present to think seriously about anything but beer. While Mathgamhain’s men were choosing a new captain from among themselves, he wandered away among the trees until he came to a clear-trodden path that he thought led to Glendower’s Oak, where the slain and the captive alike went, and where there might be something on hand other than William’s stickily dangerous mead. The woods seemed thicker and wilder here, laced with deep, luminous alleys, and the air tasted of old silence. Farrell began to play softly as he walked—a Latin drinking song that Chaucer had known—and presently paused to retune the lute to a more suitable mode. But for that halt, he might not have heard Aiffe’s voice directly ahead of him nor had time to lie down by the path among tree roots and long grass. He could not see her, because his cheek was tucked hard against spongy bark and his eyes were shut. He knew beyond the absurdity of it that she would find him if he opened his eyes.

  “Nay, this is mine,” she was saying, “this is my triumph and no other’s. But for the piffling form of it, I’d face them singlehanded, with no knights at my back, no father to serve as my front and weary me with counsel. And no dorky Nicholas Bonner, neither, to tell me what I may and mustn’t do. Just me, just Aiffe—gods, what a wonder.” Her fierce snicker actually resounded in the lute, and Farrell quickly smothered its tiny answer against his belly.

  Silken old laughter responded to hers just as the lute had done. “What, no sweet Nicholas Bonner, then, to nourish your glory? A summer’s apprenticeship, and you’ll pension me off and make your way alone? Greedy, thankless child, you wound my heart.”

  “I was never your stupid apprentice,” she answered angrily. “You’re in this world because of my power, but you’ve got none of your own—I know that for sure, anyway. And yeah, I do think I’ve learned just about all you’ve got to teach me, what do you think about that?” The voices had stopped approaching, and Farrell opened one eye a little way.

  She was standing no more than fifty feet from him, facing Nicholas Bonner on the path. They were dressed alike as squires in boots, hose, and rather faded doublets, though Aiffe’s hair was hidden by a hooded cape, while Nicholas Bonner wore only an owl’s feather in his melon-yellow mane. He said, indulgently malicious, “And that little matter of the old woman who left you drooling in the Street? You’d handle her without me?”

  Aiffe snorted, derisive and uncomfortable at once. “Maybe yes, maybe no. She’s your old woman, your big thing, you handle her. I’ve got no problem with her, except that she’s too strong. I don’t like people to be that strong.”

  Nicholas Bonner’s voice was as soothing as sunlit mist. “Well, we’re here to learn how strong you are, my own sweeting. This toy war of theirs is your tiltyard, your testing ground—let’s see what you can do, then. The small plagues were an exercise; you could have done those in your sleep—in fact, you have.” He was stroking her, slipping his hands under the cape. “Time now for something a bit more demanding.”

  Aiffe sighed and giggled, letting the cape fall from her. “Why do you always want to do this? You don’t get anything out of it; you think I don’t know? Why do you want it?”

  Nicholas Bonner answered her honestly and with something close to dignity. “Dear love, I enjoy exactly what you enjoy, and that is the sensual
ity of power. There is no other pleasure I can take, even if I would. Yet each time we couple, you and I, something moves, something is born, as it is with real people. I am well content.” When he laid her down on the cape, her small, round breasts butted at him like cats.

  Farrell began to crawl slowly backward, away from the path, but he had covered only a few yards when a heavy body pinioned his own, kneeing the breath out of him, and a hand went over his mouth. Ben whispered, “Don’t move.” Farrell squirmed his head to the side and saw him, face dark with dirty sweat, helmet askew and one of the horns badly chipped. Aiffe was chanting, the cold words whining out of her in the same rhythm with which Nicholas Bonner entered. Farrell watched them, rapt and ashamed, until Ben nudged him and they scrabbled off into comforting brambles. When Farrell looked back, he thought the air was shivering and sliding where Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner lay, like the air over the classroom radiator, that first school winter. Thought you were going blind at the age of seven.

  “How did they get here?” he asked. “Simon’s had people patrolling the shore all day.”

  Ben shook his head, immediately professorial, even wearing bear claws. “Simon’s been watching the only three places where a rowboat can beach. That’s not patrolling. Patrolling is when you keep an eye out for things like kayaks. They just slipped in from the Marin County side, easy as you please. Who needs magic?”

  The leaves whirred softly overhead, like bicycle pedals, as they made their way back across the island. A Cooper’s hawk ripped down through the slanting light, striking for something almost at their feet, then flapped up into an ash tree, where it sat panting hard and staring at them furiously. Farrell said, “That’s not just your garden-variety quickie going on back there. That is machinery.”