The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  “Armed combat,” Julie said. “The same way you win your knighthood or become one of the Nine Dukes. There are a few rituals and trials to go through, but everything comes down to fighting. Bohemond’s only been king for a couple of months, since the Twelfth Night Tourney.”

  The pavane ended with a bone-whistle trill of the crumhorns and a lingering sunset flare of cloaks and plumed caps. Farrell saw that Garth de Montfaucon made as long and deep a reverence to the musicians as anyone there; but the young girl beside him stood up in her blue gown with a slender, edged arrogance that seemed to make the kerosene flames bow down together. Farrell could not see her face.

  “Who’s that?” he asked. The girl turned suddenly, saying something to Garth and brushing back a lion-colored wilderness of hair with her forearm. Beside him Julie said quietly, “Aiffe,” and the small sound was like the rustle of wings.

  “Aha,” Farrell said. “Aiffe of Scotland.” At this distance, his only impressions were of the fierce hair, of skin tanned almost to the same dusty shade, and of a slight, long-waisted form whose step on the earth made him remember once watching a rainstorm coming toward him across a mountain lake. It was the most elegant motion he had ever seen—a languorous pavane over the water—and nothing could have stopped it. “I know that name,” he said. “There’s a story about Aiffe.”

  The musicians had downed their instruments and were accepting paper cups of wine from all sides, as the dancers dispersed to seek their own refreshments in the pavilion. Julie shook her head and rubbed her arms. She said, “Her name is Rosanna Berry. She goes to high school. She’s fifteen years old.”

  Farrell studied the taut, haughty figure, at once a princess and a skinny golliwog under the splendid splash of hair. “Mustn’t forget to give her Prester John’s regards. The very throne may depend on it.”

  Julie stood up abruptly, brushing leaves from her gown, looking away from Farrell as he rose with her. “Let’s go home,” she said. “I shouldn’t have brought you here.” She spoke rapidly, almost mumbling. Farrell had never heard her voice so strangely dimmed.

  “Why?” he asked. “Jewel, I didn’t mean to make fun, I’m sorry.” He took her hand, turning her to face him. “I’m just trying to pick up on the rules of the game,” he said. “Jewel, what is it? I’m really sorry.” Beyond her he could see Garth de Montfaucon making his way toward the musicians, towing the girl Aiffe after him. She trailed along serenely, smiling and shaking her hair.

  Julie’s hand felt like Pierce/Harlow’s knife skidding distantly through his own. Still not quite looking at him, she said, “Of course it’s a game. Middle-class white people running around in long underwear, assistant professors hitting each other with sticks, what else could it be? Thanks for reminding me, Joe.”

  “Do you forget?” She did not answer him. Farrell said, “Old Garth—I’ll bet it’s no game for that boy. I’ll bet Garth forgets a lot.” He wanted to ask her about Ben, but told himself that it could wait until they were home. Instead he asked, “Why did you bring me here? Because of the music?”

  Crof Grant ambled improbably by, munching on a dripping turkey leg and chanting with the vacant volume of a sound truck:

  “Dool and wae for the order

  Sent our lads to the Border!

  The English, for ance, by guile wan the day;

  The Flowers of the Forest,

  That fought aye the foremost,

  The prime of our land, lie cauld in the clay.“

  Julie slipped a pale circlet of woven clover stems over Farrell’s right hand. “Favor from a lady,” she said absently. “You have to have a name and a favor.” She smiled at him then and linked her arm in his, as briskly back with him as she had been suddenly gone somewhere cold and narrow. “Because of the noises,” she said. “Come on, let’s go meet King Bohemond of Huy Braseal.”

  They crossed the clearing slowly, pausing often for Julie to be greeted as a sister by personages out of Charlemagne’s world, and Saladin’s, and Great Harry’s. Farrell was presented to a bright swagger of tunics, tabards, doublets, and mantuas answering to such names as Simon Widefarer, Olaf Holmquist, the Lady Vivienne d’Audela, Sir William the Dubious, and Don Claudio Baltasar Ruy Martin Ildefonso de Sanchez y Carvajal. They said, “Lady Murasaki, it me rejoiceth to see thee here again,” and, considering Farrell, “Well, my lady, and what sweet scoundrel is’t you bring us, say now?” Farrell was most taken with the Lady Criseyde and her husband, Duke Frederik the Falconer—they had almost identically dark, angular, shy faces—and with the black woman, whose companion introduced her as Amanishakhete, Queen of Nubia. Farrell bowed over her hand and was told, “Pay him no mind, he calls me anything comes into his head. My name is Lovita Bird, and honey, there is no improving on that.” He also met the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, whom he had last seen in the green convertible, wearing nothing but gold chains. Close to, she looked exactly like a blunt-faced, jasper-eyed Persian cat, and she scratched Farrell’s palm when he kissed her hand.

  There was no sign of Ben anywhere. Farrell would have liked a closer look at Aiffe, but she had vanished, though Garth de Montfaucon was ever present on the edge of all encounters, twiddling his mustache or the hilt of his sword. Then Julie was curtsying demurely before King Bohemond, murmuring, “God keep your Majesty.” Farrell dropped enthusiastically to his knees and cried out, “Long live the king! Kings may override grammar!”

  King Bohemond said, “What the fuck?” The men standing with him all cleared their throats, and the king mumbled wearily, “Sorry. What bodeth this outlandish manner of exhortation?”

  “It’s my favorite proverb about royalty,” Farrell explained. “The Emperor Sigismund said it, sixteenth century sometime. I think they called him on using the dative case instead of the ablative.”

  “Way to go,” the king grunted. He put both hands on Farrell’s shoulders, patting him in little tentative dabs. “Rise,” said King Bohemond. “Rise, Sir Pooh de Bear, most faithful of all my knights.” Farrell rose with some difficulty, for the king was leaning heavily on him, humming what sounded like Your Cheatin‘ Heart to himself. Farrell managed it by clinging unobtrusively to the griffin-embroidered silken stole that crisscrossed on Bohemond’s chest.

  Julie said, “May it please your Majesty, behold, I have brought for your pleasure the flower of lute players, the true nonesuch of Huy Braseal.” Farrell blushed, which surprised him very much. He began to explain about his geas, but Julie interrupted and did it for him, speaking the moonshine English as trippingly as if she had been born to it. The king watched her with grudging admiration.

  “Damn castle talk wears me out,” he complained loudly, wheezing nut-brown ale all over Farrell. “I call it castle talk because you can’t call it a damn language, it doesn’t have any rules. Just so it sounds like Prince Valiant would have said it. Pitiful, you know?”

  The red Tudor cleared his throat again. “Sire, my liege, will’t please you join the Queen? She waiteth upon you even now, for to lead the galliard.” He had a high, toneless voice and deepset eyes like pearls.

  “Castle talk,” King Bohemond said. “MGM talk, Classic Comics talk—Walter Scott, for God’s sake, it’s all bits and snatches of Scott, anyway.” His voice rose, turning sadly spiteful. “Of course, it doesn’t matter to them. They aren’t in ethnolinguistics, they don’t feel the slightest responsibility to language. I mean, fuck syntax, fuck morphology, right? Hey, whatever feels good.”

  He spread his arms wide, striking an attitude of grinning, mindless benevolence. His crown fell off, and Farrell bent to pick it up. “Your Majesty, the Emperor Sigismund may have meant only—”

  King Bohemond said, “Nobody is above grammar. I mean, that’s like being above digestion, right?” He grinned messily at Farrell, jabbing a companionable elbow into his side. “See, I’m embarrassing them, look at them.” He glowered around him at the amused noble lords and damsels who came drifting up over the grass in their tights and mantles and gently eddying go
wns. “Nobody ever expected me to come out of nowhere. They pass that crown back and forth like a fucking basketball. I was not expected. So now they’re stuck with this goddamn peasant, this peasant king. Because, of course, nobody ever volunteers to be a peasant, some poor, ignorant, shitkicking serf, they use him for the fifty-yard line in their goddamn tournaments. So the king has to do it, the king has to represent the masses. Whole new tradition around here.”

  A harshly handsome young woman, taller than he, was abruptly at his side, whispering grimly to him as she rubbed with a wet finger at a stain on his alba camisia. King Bohemond wriggled away from her, mumbling, “A people’s king,” but she moved with him, straightening his crown and tucking the trailing ends of his stole back into his girdle.

  Julie murmured in Farrell’s ear, “Queen Leonora.”

  “I believe it,” Farrell said.

  King Bohemond broke loose again and inquired of Farrell with a sudden surprising dignity, “Th’art a musicker, sayest? Play an air for us, then, that we may know thee. For the reeds and the strings say who we are, beyond all misconceiving, and were each of us a man of music, there would be no more falsehood nor treachery in the world, surely.”

  Farrell heard the black Saracen purr, “Nor no more marrying, neither.” His voice was a strange voice, soft and rough at once, sounding just at Farrell’s back, though he was standing nowhere near.

  One of the musicians provided a lute, another a drum for a footstool. Farrell tuned the lute slowly, looking around the clearing. Among the gathering faces he saw the Lady Criseyde and Duke Frederik standing quietly together, while three children dressed as greenwood ragamuffins—the eldest could not have been twelve—perched stolidly on one another’s shoulders to see him. Julie had pointed them out, saying that they did tumbling, juggling and tightrope-walking at all the fairs. The Countess Elizabeth Bathory watched from the musicians’ dais, regarding Farrell with pudgy, cheerful voraciousness. Crof Grant, a snowplow in saffron, came cleaving his way through to the front, nodding and beaming upon the laird-haunted air, smiling forgivingly at those who hadn’t jumped aside in time. He finally caromed off Garth de Montfaucon and stalled just behind Queen Leonora.

  Farell said, “Your Majesties. My lords and ladies all. Attend, I pray you, to a canso of the great troubadour Pierol, who was so sad in love so long ago.” He began to play a pattering, spidery prelude, retarding gradually after a few bars to a supple three-quarter time, barely emphasized. He sang in French, knowing better than to attempt the Provençal.

  “Bien des gens, hélas, me blament

  De chanter si rarement.

  La douleur fletrit mon ame.

  Et mon coeur est en tourment.

  Pourrais-je donc chanter galment,

  Quand il taut que je proclame

  Que m’afflige durement

  L’amour que j’ai pour ma dame?“

  The lute was less responsive than his own, and the song’s pitch was uncomfortable for his voice. He modulated into a different key, taking refuge in modern harmonies, ad-libbing a pattern of octaves over a completely anachronistic moving bass line. Wes Montgomery goes to the Crusades. But all such awareness seemed to be sliding rustily away from him like a railroad station as he played and sang a complaint eight hundred years old to fire-striped faces framed and lighted by the tall collars of cloaks, balanced between ruffles and plumes.

  “Dans un deuil amer me plonge

  Sa cruauté sans recours.

  C’est grand mal: un doux mensonge

  Me serait d’un tel secours.“

  Even one sweet lie would have rescued me from this torment. A switchblade flick of a grin passed between Garth de Montfaucon and the red Tudor; but the Lady Criseyde hugged her husband’s arm against her, and the green eyes of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory went round and thoughtful. The tall mercenary captain called Simon Widefarer scratched his grizzled bare chest and smiled; the thick, rumpled Sir William the Dubious fussed with his sagging hose; the black Saracen patted his fingertips together soundlessly. Farrell looked for Julie and sang the last lines to her, as Pierol or his jongleur might have sought out one waiting fire-striped glance in the cold, sooty hall.

  “Alors que pleure nuit et jour,

  Et ne vois pas, méme en songe,

  De remède a cet amour

  Que mon coeur tenaille et ronge,

  Que mon coeur tenaille et ronge.”

  The lute pinged into silence on an unresolved chord, leaving Pierol’s formal sorrow wandering in the night. And I see no help, even in dreams, for this love which claws and devours my heart. Farrell bowed deeply to King Bohemond and Queen Leonora.

  He thought he had done well enough, for someone faking it in the wrong key; but when he heard the rustling and raised his head to see them all bowing to him, as they did for musicians—the gowns and cloaks sweeping down like wind-driven rain, the jeweled chains and girdles glinting like rain in the moonlight—then suddenly he found that he was shivering painfully with tenderness and excitement and fear.

  The king said gruffly, “Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.”

  Farrell retuned the lute and struck into A L’Entrade. Somewhere far away the choice astonished him considerably: he had never been able to domesticate that rowdy estam pie into a proper concert number and he could not remember the last time he had even practiced it. But his sweating hands took over, attacking the piece as savagely and sloppily as the troubadours’ dung-booted patrons had gone at their meals. The strings buzzed, cawed, whined, twangled, and the music lunged up singing with outrageous exultancy to welcome a twelfth-century spring and make wild, heartless mock of jealousy and old age. Begone, begone far from here! Let us dance, let us dance joyously all together, eya!

  The Lady Criseyde and her grave-eyed lord Duke Frederik were the first who turned to face each other and join hands. They moved like tall birds of plain plumage, and Farrell made slips in his playing, watching them. Other couples followed quickly as the four musicians took up the tune, the rebec replaced by a shawm. King Bohemond and Queen Leonora shoved and stumbled to the head of the double line, jumping in on the wrong beat, but leading the dance with a kind of desperate pomp, even so. Garth de Montfaucon pounced down on Julie, swooping her under his arm and prancing away with her, feigning jolly goatishness. Farrell saw sourly that he was easily the best dancer among the men.

  The horns drowned him out once they got together, the crumhorns burring and humming, the shawm blasting away like a marching band. Farrell put the lute down on the dais after a while. He felt himself becoming, not at all sad, but very still, oddly content to be invisible, watching the dance recede from him. But there was as well a curious prickling deep in his nerves; an eager, elusive disquiet that turned him, almost unknowing, away from the costumed revelers and toward the darkness beyond the clearing. Where did Ben go? I should look for Ben.

  As the trees drew nearer, the vague fretfulness sharpened in him, becoming something like the mood that seizes on horses when there is a wind rising or rain brooding, or when the presence of lightning sets every molecule of the air on edge. He halted once and looked back, seeing the lights and hearing the music, dainty with distance now, as he had found them when he first walked through the night meadow with Julie. But here comes the King to trouble our dancing, eya! afraid lest some youth should carry off his April-drunk Queen, eya! A fox laughed metallically on his right; from the redwoods gathering before him, some drowsy bird cooed two icy notes over and over. He heard someone singing to herself under the trees.

  It was a thin, whining little song, such as a child drones endlessly at play in the dirt. If there were words, Farrell heard none, but the sound gave a voice to the restlessness jigging inside him, and he went toward it, feeling himself once more warm between the paws of the inevitable. The song rose slightly, more or less repeating itself in a higher pitch, drearily persistent. The fox yapped a second time, and the moon went out and came back on again.

  Farrell never actually saw it
happen; the moment was so brief that he was aware of it only as he might have sensed an awkward splice in a film—a twitch of color values, a phrase or gesture only partly accounted for. But for just that wink he felt everything inside himself—blood, breath, digestion, the cells greedily feeding and bearing and dying—stop too; and he stood where he was, while a warm breeze that smelled almost pleasantly of rotting fruit flicked past him and was gone.

  Just ahead, in the older night under the trees, the woman’s song ended in a tiny, crumpled yelp of terror. A man began to laugh, softly at first.

  Chapter 9

  It was charming laughter, but not nice. Farrell had never heard laughter like that; there was a dissolving sweetness in it, and the memory of many good times, and no kindness at all. Sirens, he thought, mermaids. It hung in the air like the smell of burning.

  From where he stood, Farrell could not discern the man’s face in the darkness, but he heard his voice as clearly as if the two of them were across a chessboard from one another, or a sword’s length apart. “God a’mercy, and here’s poor Nicholas again, all alive-o!” It was a light, curling voice, the words airily poising their feet to dance, and something in the rhythm made Farrell think about the yellow-eyed man who had stumped like a falcon into Sia’s house at midnight. He had dreamed of the man twice since then.

  “Arms, legs, senses, fancies, follies, and lovesome honey appetites, every one with me still,” the stranger announced cheerfully. “Now bless thy weazeny breech and lantern countenance, my sweeting, and may Nicholas Bonner present his unchurched compliments?” Farrell heard a small scuffle, apparently halted by an almost inaudible squeak from the woman, and then the wonderful soulless laughter again. “Nay, so, so there, dear duck—surely thy dam lulled thee to the roll of blessings awaiting for her who’s first to lie with springtime Nick, come all chilled and lonely out of old dull dark once more. Thy firstling will know the talk of all animals, thy second-born the cry of gold in the earth—hither, then, swiftly, for I’m cold, I’m cold.” For that instant there was such wailing sadness and terror in the voice that Farrell could not breathe.