The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  When Farrell continued to stare at her without speaking, she sighed a little and put his hand away from her. “You can go now, Joe. I just needed a little company for a while. I will be fine here, thank you.” But she looked all at once like a very young girl trembling with her first real lie. Farrell wanted to hold her, but she turned away again, and he found himself approaching the door, trying to look back. Someone in the room was making tiny, disconsolate sounds; he assumed it was Briseis, and then realized that the sounds were his own.

  He had begun to open the door, already feeling the jaws of air beyond closing slowly on him, when she said, “Stay, Joe. I am not fine. Stay with me until Ben comes home.”

  So Farrell stood at the window with her, and they held hands while the house whined and sang and moaned all around the imaginary bubble of her room. He did not want to look out of her window ever again, but she said, “It’s all right, there is only Avicenna out there now, I promise you. Sometimes that is all I see.” And she kept her word; the high windows looked down on remembered roofs and streets, parked cars, the bright haze of the Bay, and people Farrell knew working in their gardens, appearing motionless as waves seen from far away.

  “I will miss it so,” she said beside him. “This hell of a place, I will miss it so much. This fat body, walking mud puddle, deceived by everything, this impossible, ruinous accident of a world, these people who would truly rather hurt one another than eat—oh, there is nothing, nothing, nothing I would not do to stay here ten minutes longer. Oh, I will leave clawmarks, I will drag mountains and forests away under my fingernails when I am dragged off. Such a stupid way to feel. I will be all dirty from clutching at this stupid planet, and the gods will laugh at me.”

  Farrell said, “When we made love, it wasn’t really me, was it?” She did not answer, but held his hand against her breast. “Clutching at the whole stupid planet?” Sia nodded, and Farrell said, “I’m honored,” and they waited silently after that until Ben came home.

  Chapter 18

  Julie did not call; instead, she came to find him late one afternoon at the restoration shop. Farrell smelled her before he saw her and scrambled out of a rumble seat he was reupholstering, trying hard to look distantly pleased. She stood the car’s length away from him, announcing, “I’m still pissed at you, but I miss you. We have things to talk about, and I think you should come home with me and cook us some scallops Marsala. With new potatoes and those nice green beans in peanut sauce, please. But I’m still pissed.”

  Farrell said, “Well, I think you’re overreacting and unreasonable; and I think that’s a dumb way to wear you hair. Give me ten minutes.”

  To do her justice, she told him about Micah Willows before he started cooking; to be fair to him, he went ahead with the dinner and threw in a fruit salad with a lemon and yogurt dressing. But it was beyond him to set her plate down in front of her without the scallops bouncing like popcorn, or to forbear from saying, “Just don’t start him calling me up for recipes, that’s all.”

  “It’ll only be for a couple of weeks,” she said. “Two weeks at the most. You ought to know I can’t have anyone around all the time for more than two weeks.” Farrell dropped potatoes onto her plate like depth charges. “Joe, the doctor said he needs to be around people he knows, somebody he trusts, until he can trust himself to be whole again. Right now, I am about all he’s got. His family’s back in Columbus, I’ve been on the phone with them almost every day. They’ll pay all his hospital bills, send any money he needs, anything, just so he doesn’t come home. He has nowhere else to go.”

  “A genuine remittance man,” Farrell said. “Nicholas Bonner’s got the same problem. Right. I’ll clear my stuff out of the bathroom first thing.”

  She caught hold of his arm as he started to turn away and made him face her. “Joe, God damn it, Micah and I have things to settle. We never broke up, he just got possessed.” In spite of himself, Farrell laughed outright at the cozy madness of the statement, and she laughed too, shaking her head and covering her mouth for a moment, as her grandmother had taught her. She said “I don’t know what it was I felt for him and I need to find out, because I can’t stand loose ends. And you and I have a whole lot of business to do yet, because our special relationship happens to be all loose ends, and because we have seen things together that nobody but the other one will ever believe. So we have to be really careful never to lose each other, whatever else happens. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Joe?”

  “Everybody asks me that,” he said. “Jewel, since the day we met, you have never once waited around for me to understand anything. Don’t start now, or I’ll know you’re getting old. Just be careful and call me if you need me, recipes included. Eat your damn scallops, you made such a thing about them.”

  Julie said quietly, “I am getting old.” When he left her house, she held him at the door, looking at him with a strange, angry appeal in her face. “Joe, I’m not going to tell you not to go to the Whalemas Tourney. Just be careful of yourself. Crof’s dead and Micah’s been damaged, and I don’t want to lose any more people I care about. It really does feel like getting old, going bad, feeling my senses shrinking up one by one. You’re as weird as Aiffe, in your own little way, but I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, ever.” She put her head down on his shoulder for a moment and then she stepped back inside her house and shut the door.

  In the last ten days before the Tourney, the League for Archaic Pleasures itself seemed to disappear. There were no more classes, no feasts or dances, no more comradely evenings of old music and old stories. Farrell saw only the women of the League on the street, and them almost entirely at two or three specialized fabric shops. Their lords were at home, furbishing up their arms and armor, whacking grimly away at painted four-by-fours in the backyard or arranging hurried private sessions with John Erne. In practice with Basilisk, Farrell found the musicians giving twenty to one against King Bohemond’s retaining the crown, with Benedictis de Griffin and Raoul of Carcassonne equal favorites at three to one, and Garth de Montfaucon attracting the long-shot money at ten to one. It was understood that all bets were off if Egil Eyvindsson entered the lists.

  “You can’t help being interested in it, just from that angle,” Farrell said to Hamid and Lovita. They had been to a silent movie, then stopped for ice cream on the way home. He said, “When it’s people you know. I can get six-and-a-half to one on Simon Widefarer.”

  “Those odds don’t mean doodly,” Hamid said. “Not in this tourney.” Farrell raised his eyebrows. “There’s the whole wild-card thing, they didn’t tell you? At the Whalemas Tourney the combats don’t have to be set up in advance—no eliminations, nothing. Anybody can challenge anybody, and you about have to accept the match.”

  “Marvelous,” Farrell said. “Some back-country baron gets hot for a day, and the book goes out the window. I gather that’s how Bohemond won it last year.”

  Lovita shook her head, making a tiny, subversive ballet out of the simple act of licking ice cream off her upper lip. “That girl got mad at her daddy, ‘cause he grounded her or some such, and so she put some kind of protection on Bohemond. I was there. People started getting sick, having accidents, just before they went to fight him. Frederik, old Garth, they couldn’t touch him, their swords just came sliding off the air. I was there, I saw it.”

  Hamid nodded confirmation. “After that was when she really started being Aiffe all the time.”

  During those days, the strange clench on Sia’s house often relaxed for long periods, though it never went away altogether. Farrell was amazed at how easily he became accustomed to the change in pressure, although to walk through the front door was like plunging fathoms deep under the sea, and his head hurt constantly when he was there. But in a short time, it became merely another condition of that unlikely house, like the mockingly mobile windows and the room so far above stairs[abovestairs?] where Sia waited for her son to come to her. Always, after a slack period, the grip would return wit
h an abrupt viciousness that made the walls twang and the fireplace bricks whimper against one another, while Briseis only touched down once on her way to the backyard. At such times, the house smelled strongly of dry thunder, more faintly of rotting fruit.

  Sia rarely left the room upstairs anymore. Farrell set out several times to hunt for her, but Briseis would never guide him again, and he never got as far as the servants’ stair. When she did come down, she moved in the house like a bear half-roused from hibernation, focusing on no one living, bumping hard into furniture, if not watched carefully. Suzy McManus could not endure to see her so, but burst into tears each time Sia wandered past without taking any notice of her. Eventually she stopped coming to the house, as client or as housekeeper, though she telephoned every day to ask after Sia.

  Farrell saw something like recognition in Sia’s face whenever they met, but no acknowledgment of secrets shared, nor of any tender acquaintance. Her eyes were terrifyingly alive, crowded to blindness with the memories of a black stone, and Farrell could not look into them any longer than he had been able to look out through them. In his mind he said to her, over and over, I will not forget, you will forget before I will, and once he thought that she nodded as she climbed away from him again, struggling wearily back up to her one safe place, which did not exist anywhere.

  Between them, he and Ben worked out a schedule, making certain that she would never be left alone in the house. Farrell had broached the subject differently[diffidently?] during another silent dinner, but Ben’s reaction was surprisingly swift and precise, and more realistic than his own. “It won’t make a damn bit of difference, you know that, Joe. This is not exactly keeping an eye on Grandma so she doesn’t fall down in the bathroom. We can’t protect her, we can’t do a thing for her. We’re doing this to comfort ourselves and for no other reason. Just so you know that.”

  “I know it,” Farrell said, briefly irritable. “I know who’s after her and what they want—I even know why you can’t ever pop your ears in this joint. Have you noticed that it plays hell with the TV reception, by the way? I haven’t been sure what you think about lately.”

  “What I think is that it must take one hell of a lot of concentration to keep this up, even for Aiffe. I don’t see how she’ll be able to think about the Whalemas Tourney and Sia at the same time.”

  “I don’t suppose that matters very much, either. Nicholas Bonner can.” Getting up to wash the dishes, he said over his shoulder, “You’re feeling a little better, aren’t you? I mean, about Egil.”

  Ben was silent for almost as long a time as it took the idiot echoes of that question to fade inside Farrell’s head. He said at last, “I don’t know how I feel about anything, Joe. I mostly know how Egil Eyvindsson feels. He may be dead, but I know him, I am him, he’s still real, and Ben Kassoy is something I have to think about and act out. Right now, sitting here, I’m acting, trying to remember how Ben is supposed to hold his face when he talks, and what he does with his hands.” He laughed suddenly, adding, “Maybe I could get a grant. I had one when I was studying Egil in the first place.” Through the window over the sink Farrell saw two small neighbor children trying to get Briseis to play with them, toddling after her in the smudgy lavender sunset.

  Ben said, “Egil was my sanity. The real crazies go to meetings, teach what they love to people who don’t love anything, and stand around at receptions for years with other crazy people who never do give a shit about them. And they don’t know what anything is, just what everybody thinks it’s like. Egil knows—knew, Egil knew what poetry is, and what God is, and what death is. I’d just rather be Egil, but what I’m going to be is the head of the Lit Board next year.” Farrell turned to look at him and saw the same lost hunger in his face that he himself felt for other summer twilights and the tall fathers watching from other windows. Ben said, “I was having a good time, Joe. I’ll never have a good time like that again. Just tenure.”

  The schedule was easy and uneventful to maintain, and, as Ben had predicted, completely unnecessary. Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner made no approach to the house, though Ben and Farrell juggled night watches as well as seminars and rehearsals and slept in their clothes like firemen. Sia appeared to notice the new surveillance no more than she noticed anything else human, which made it even more surprising when she insisted that Ben accompany Farrell to the Whalemas Tourney. He tried to make a joke out of his refusal, saying, “You had me dragging after him all through that stupid goddamn war on the island, and he didn’t even have the grace to get killed. Enough, already, he can take care of himself.”

  But there was no arguing with her; she said only, “I need to be alone and I am too tired to make up a good lie for you. Watch those two at the tournament, if you like, and if they leave while it is still going on, then you may come back here. Otherwise, you are to stay until everything is over.” She was mumbling from far away, sounding almost apologetic in the face of Ben’s anger and distress, but there was no arguing with her.

  From the first, the tourney had always begun at noon on the front lawn of the Waverly Hotel. Farrell went in slashed blue trunk-hose and a jade-green velvet doublet; but Ben, going under protest, wore sneakers, jeans, a felt fishing hat, and a ragged denim jacket over a T-shirt bearing a family portrait of the Borgias. “I don’t dress up anymore. This is the Whalemas Tourney, I can wear any damn thing I feel like.” Looking back at the house as Madame Schumann-Heink grumbled flatulently away down Scotia Street, he said absently, “Like your threads, though. Early Burt Lancaster, very rich period. Very classy.”

  “Julie gave them to me,” Farrell said. “Ben, I know she won’t be all right without us, but she’ll be the way she wants to be. We have to honor that, just to comfort ouselves.”

  Ben said, “Farrell, when I want California pieties, you’ll be the first I’ll ask.” They drove the rest of the way in silence, until, nearing the Waverly, he asked a very different question rather gently. “How’s she doing, by the way, Julie? You guys talking to each other at all?”

  “We call,” Farrell said. “Micah sleeps a lot. Sometimes he has terrible nightmares and then he cries for hours. But he knows who he really is and what century he’s really in. We progress.”

  “We certainly do. He’s already overqualified to be President. Will she be coming to the Tourney?”

  Farrell shook his head. “She’s like you, it would take Sia to make her go. And she’s got this other person to take care of, and I am being civilized about it. I cannot believe how civilized I am being.”

  “Um. Egil didn’t think much of our civilization, the little he saw of it. He thought it was probably all right, for people who really didn’t care a lot about anything.”

  There was no parking left at the Waverly, and they were lucky to find curb space two blocks away. The great front lawn was sown with pavilions extending in wildflower clumps and surges across the courtyard, past the triton fountain and around to the rear of the hotel, overflowing the ornamental carriageways into the parking lot. The standards and blazons of the high nobles—the Nine Dukes and three or four others—were displayed in a grand arc facing the lists—an open stretch of greensward, bounded only by the lords’ pavilions and, at the far end, the gilded double throne—half porch swing, half howdah—in which King Bohemond and Queen Leonora would sit. There were merchants’ and craftsmens’ booths and the usual small dais for the musicians. Bright skeins of pennons and ensigns frisked up from many of the tents directly to the awnings and window ledges of the Waverly, so that the Tourney appeared to be a true part of the castle itself—a summer dishevelment, a careless unraveling of austere towers. The banner of the League—a crowned golden Sagittarius on a field of midnight blue—floated from the highest turret of the Waverly.

  Pushing through a growing crowd of onlookers to step onto the tourney field was a new experience for Farrell. The League staged few public events: outsiders in proper dress were usually welcome at the tilts and revels, but only at the crafts fairs or at exhibit
ions of Renaissance dancing or medieval combat techniques had Farrell ever seen any tolerance for the casual spectator. “We’re not a softball game,” the Lady Criseyde had replied tersely, the one time he asked her about audiences, “We’re an air, an atmosphere. You don’t sell tickets to an atmosphere.”

  “Maybe so,” Ben grunted when Farrell quoted her now. “All I know is, the first couple of years they had to rent the space. Now they get it for free, and all the help they need setting up, and the hotel starts advertising three months in advance. Part of their Labor Day package.” The young knights were already banging challenges on each other’s shields, hung outside their tents, and the children of the League went scampering across the lists, kicking out at each other like horses in the wind. Aiffe led them, pouncing and spinning with the rest and, when Farrell caught her eye, she laughed silently and turned a cartwheel.

  “I’ll be damned,” Farrell said softly. “Look at that. He really pulled it off.” The lists were sprinkled thickly with tiny scarlet flowers, shaped exactly like the upright flukes of a sounding whale. Farrell bent close to touch one and found that it was real and growing, not thrust into the earth for the occasion, as he had assumed. Ben said only, “Happens every year. I have no idea how he does it.” They agreed to meet behind a particular pavilion after the opening ceremonies, and Farrell went off to take his place with Basilisk on the musicians’ dais. He put one of the scarlet flowers carefully in his cap, remembering the story of St. Whale.

  A pair of cornets, cold and sweet and regal, silenced the tourney field precisely at twelve, convoying Bohemond and Leonora to the throne. Basilisk followed with a pavane for the entrance of the Nine Dukes and their households. It went strangely badly, sliding sideways out of the old instruments, twisting away off Farrell’s lutestrings, jeering like chalk on a blackboard. Hamid ibn Shanfara was standing nearby, scanning a scroll of music, and Farrell whispered, “What is it? We practiced the hell out of that tune, there’s no reason in the world for it to sound like that. This is very weird.”