The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  Arnulf did not answer, but the Ronin Benkei shifted slightly to catch the combat master’s attention. “Your back leg,” he said. “You moved your back leg way around to your left for the first cut, and that lured his shield out of line, even before you got it up in front of his eyes. Then you threw your weight back and pivoted and went in.” His voice was very soft and uninflected.

  John Erne nodded curtly. “The important thing is keeping your own shield in the same position all the way through. Move those shoulders even a little, and you wind up tied in a knot with Sir Gregory the Grungy about to stave in the back of your head.” He laughed his soundless laugh again, but his cheeks were flushing rustily as he looked at the students. He said, “Remember, my gentlemen, this is a representation of death. This has no point system, no electronic umpires, no Olympic team. This is a matter of someone trying very hard to split your skull with eight pounds of iron. If you don’t know that when you’re fighting, absolutely, then you’re missing the point of everything, and I really don’t want you in my class.” Farrell heard a faint whiny rustle as John Erne drew breath and realized that the combat master was an asthmatic.

  He asked Hamid about it later, as they were walking away from the old house with Felix Arabia, Lovita, and Matteo. The Saracen nodded, the scattering of silver hairs in his beard glinting in the blue city moonlight. “It’s under control now, but I guess it came near killing him when he was young. That’s the one truly personal thing I know about him.”

  Matteo said, “Well, that’s probably why he’s so obsessed by this stuff, he’s compensating.”

  But Felix Arabia hooted him down. “Fast-food psychology. Lovita’s right, the man’s crackers, that’s all. Functional, pretty harmless—although I can imagine circumstances where maybe he wouldn’t be so harmless—but a stoneground Wheat Thin.”

  They were still arguing when they parted from Farrell, Lovita, and Hamid, crossing the street to catch a bus. On the corner Matteo called back to Farrell, “Basilisk has rehearsals every Wednesday night. My place—Hamid’ll tell you how to get there.” Farrell waved and smiled.

  “You going to join up with them?” Lovita asked.

  Farrell said nothing until they turned down the side street where he had parked Madame Schumann-Heink illegally. “The only thing I’ve ever joined was the linoleum layer’s union. I haven’t played with a group in years. Probably wouldn’t fit in too well.”

  Hamid said, “Do it. They play good music and they’re a kick to work with. And you can be part of the League or not, nobody expects the musicians to do all that much. Yeah, Basilisk would be just about right for you.”

  There was a parking ticket flapping like a trapped moth under Madame Schumann-Heink’s windshield wiper blades. Farrell put it in his pocket and turned with his hand on the door latch. He said, “I’ve met Prester John.” Hamid’s face became very still. Farrell went on, “You’re a griot, you’re a rememberer, you know everything about the League. Tell me what happened to Prester John.”

  Hamid ibn Shanfara, whose true name Farrell never learned, glanced sideways at Lovita Bird, but it was the Queen of Nubia who looked disdainfully back at him. She had been largely silent during the combat class, paying elaborate attention to her nails and to an imagined stain on her leather skirt. She said to Farrell, “Honey, the man can’t tell you. I mean, he won’t ever tell me what went down about all that, so he damn sure better not just decide to drop it all on you now.” Hamid put his arm around her; it was the first awkward move that Farrell had seen him make. Lovita said, “It’s that girl, I know that much, anyway. Something real nasty she did, but won’t nobody talk about it. Not him, nobody.”

  “Prester John was a friend of Julie’s,” Farrell said. “I really need to know, Hamid.”

  “Nothing to know.” Hamid’s voice was as quiet and reasonable as the people who climbed the stairs to Sia. “Nothing to tell. Whatever happened, it happened, no way to make it unhappen.” He implied a bow without actually performing it and turned away.

  “A whole lot of people sure trying, though,” Lovita Bird said to the air.

  Ben’s car was in the driveway when Farrell got back, but Sia and he were already in their bedroom, although it was still early for them. Farrell ate an apple, dialed all but the last digit of Julie’s phone number twice, felt morosely pleased with himself for not interrupting her work, and spent an hour coaxing a fever-eyed Briseis out of the broom closet. She could not be dragged anywhere near the front door, so they went out back together and sat in Ben’s garden, listening to the distant respiration of traffic and the vicious squabbling of nightbirds.

  Chapter 12

  As it turned out, saying anything to Ben in the following days would have been like trying to subpoena a quark. He managed to be gone every morning, no matter how early Farrell made a point of coming down to breakfast, and the only weekend difference was Sia’s excuse for his absence. Farrell knew his office hours and twice used his own rotating half-day off to visit him on campus; both times he was told that Ben had left ten minutes before. As aware as Farrell had always been of his own skill at avoiding even the shadow of an inconvenient confrontation, he had never suspected that Ben shared the same gifts, and he marveled and was indignant. What I do is what I do, but I really thought better of him. What kind of model is that for our youth?

  Inevitably, of course, they were both in the same house on the same evening. They were not in the same room any more than Ben could help it; but on four separate occasions, they sat down with Sia to the same dinner. Somewhat to his own surprise, Farrell let none of those encounters go past without bringing up the matter of the dance in Barton Park, Ben’s disappearance after it, and Sia’s mysterious and bruising standoff with Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner. He threw in McManus once, partly by accident, but partly because he was genuinely enjoying the new experience of being the relentless Hound of Heaven. Very addictive, wanting to know things. Lead you into worse ways if you’re not careful.

  Three times, like one of John Erne’s students, Ben turned Farrell’s attack lightly, using as his shield a careless mix of jokes, digressions, and an all but insulting account of overdosing on nut-brown ale and getting clumsily mugged by equally drunk incompetents. When Farrell asked why he had kept his membership in the League For Archaic Pleasures secret, Ben only shrugged, half smiling. “Part of it was Crof Grant, I guess. I couldn’t quite see telling you that that fool and I played the same dress-up game. And it was you, too, because you’ve always had an idea of me that doesn’t go with dress-up. As if it would be all right for you to get involved with something like the League, but not for me. I really thought about your being embarrassed for me. Probably why I didn’t want to recognize you.”

  Farrell looked hard at Sia, but the gray eyes under their thick lids were as brutally empty—or as full of things I can’t see—as Egil Eyvindsson’s eyes had been.

  But on the fourth evening, the first tentative words out of Farrell’s mouth on the subject of vanishings and visitations brought Ben to his feet, leaning across the table to shout a furious confession. “God damn you, Joe, I have seizures! You know about seizures? As in fits? As in roll on the ground, foam at the mouth, swallow your tongue, run into walls? As in start out for work and wake up two days later in the drunk tank, the mental ward, Intensive Care? Any of that stuff ring a bell?” He was stammering and shuddering with rage, and his face seemed out of focus because of the way the small muscles were struggling under the skin.

  “Epilepsy?” Farrell’s voice sounded in his own ears like a mumbled request for spare change. “You never missed any school. I was the one.” Ben shook his head, interrupting him impatiently. “It isn’t epilepsy. No one can tell me just what it is. And I never had it when we were kids, it didn’t start until—” He hesitated only minimally. “—until after college.” Amazingly he smiled, but it was a flinch of the lips, lasting no longer than the pause. “As a matter of fact, I had two attacks when we were living on Tenth Avenue. One time y
ou weren’t home, and the other you were busy with some girl, you wouldn’t have noticed a UFO. And they were a lot milder back then, the seizures.”

  Sia had vanished unnoticed, as she could always do when she chose. Farrell said, “You should have told me.”

  Ben sat down again, his anger exhausted as abruptly and frighteningly as it had flowered. “No, I shouldn’t have. I should not have.”

  “The way you’ve been ducking and sliding and softshoeing around here, you know what I’ve been imagining? What the hell would have been wrong with telling me?”

  Ben was silent, rubbing so hard at the base of his throat that Farrell could see the fingermarks flushing. He said finally, “Joe, this university doesn’t yet know how to deal with women asking for equal pay. They tolerate Blacks and Chicanos out of fear—and expect to be praised for it—they flat-out hate gays, and they practically cross themselves every time they pass the one admitted diabetic on the faculty. Try imagining what would happen if they found out I had fall-down fits. I’ve never told anyone but Sia. I really wish to God you didn’t know.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Farrell said. He dug into his flan with the vigorous relief of renewed self-assurance. “Did I tell when you wrote that poem to Lidia Mirabal? Her boyfriend, Paco, he practiced a little after-school acupuncture on me every day for a week, but my lips were sealed. Mostly with East Twenty-ninth Street, but anyway.” Ben was staring down at the table. Farrell said, “It never happens in class? When you’re working?” He took a twitch of the hunched shoulders for affirmation. “Well, there you are, what can they do to you? You’re a star, you’re a hotshot, next year you’ll have tenure and then you won’t even have to show up on campus. Come on, if that’s all you’re worried about.”

  Ben touched his wrist, so lightly that it made Farrell shiver once, all over. Then he went out of the dining room, and Farrell sat still for a long while, watching the lamplight puddle and run up and down the pepper mill. When he felt the timorous nudge of Briseis’s cold nose on his ankle, he looked up to find Sia placidly watering house plants. Her gray-black hair lay loose on the shoulders of the faded Mongolian robe that she liked to wear in the evenings, and from Farrell’s angle she appeared strangely youthful, almost childlike, as she moved around the room. Even when he said, “So you knew all the time,” and she turned, heavily as ever, to peer at him shortsightedly, he was still as startled and chilled as if the twining dragons on her robe had all lifted their barbed golden heads to seek him.

  She said, “I knew what had happened to him, yes, and I knew exactly where he was. But there was nothing I could do.”

  “I could have done something,” Farrell said. “I could have brought him home. In a considerable damn sight better shape than they did.”

  “You would never have found him. And if you had, there is not a chance in the world that you would have known what to do with him.” She never interrupted her work on the plants. “In a way, it was the best thing that those two found him. But the waiting was hard.”

  “Oh, must have been,” Farrell agreed heartily. “Especially knowing exactly where he was and all.” Sour as a thirteenyear-old, he added, “If you think I’m going to ask how you came by that bit of specialized information…”

  The swift mischief that had stopped his breath at their first meeting sauntered through Sia’s eyes and was gone. “From her,” she said, nodding at Briseis, who was sitting asleep on Farrell’s foot.

  Farrell washed the dishes and went to his room. His practicing went badly that night, and he kept dreaming about falling out of boats. Aiffe and Ben were always in them with him, and Aiffe usually wanted to rescue him, but Ben never let her.

  From then on, it was most often Farrell who missed dinner, occasionally breakfast, and once or twice an entire weekend. His absences were legitimate enough—rehearsing with Basilisk demanded much more than one night a week, even when no performances were scheduled. As a practical matter, all of the group’s arrangements had to be adapted to include a lute; on a more elusive level, there was the whole question of Basilisk itself adapting to Farrell’s particular sound and style, and he to the consort’s. Farrell expected this, having been through similar rituals before. What he had not quite bargained for were the picnics, nor the impromptu potlucks, beach barbecues, volleyball games, and backpacking excursions, to all of which he was constantly being invited. He complained mildly to Hamid at one point. “Don’t they ever stop being family? I like the music fine, but the hugging is wearing me out.”

  “Village thinking,” Hamid said. “The League tends to foster that stuff, what with all the baronies and the guilds and the fellowships and such. You encourage people to be thinking in terms of small groups, tribes, that gets real natural real easy, you don’t just turn it off.” He smiled his long, disquieting smile that showed only the tips of his teeth, and added, “The Middle Ages were like that, of course. You could live out your whole life inside a few square miles.”

  Farrell said, “They really are good. I have to push to keep up with them. It’s learning on the job, too, I’m already playing gigs. We did a private party for Duke Claudio and his wife last week. That was strange, I don’t know if I liked it or not. Nobody broke character for a minute, not even when the phone rang or a fuse blew, and they even fed us in the kitchen, the way you did with musicians. Good thing they didn’t have stables.”

  Hamid’s grin sharpened. “You wait till you play someplace like Dol Amroth or Storisende.” Farrell recognized the names from Tolkien and Cabell. Hamid shook his head with great deliberateness, blowing daintily on his fingertips. He said, “Places like that, you truly get to wondering when in the world you are.”

  He walked away from any further questions and Julie was only a bit more forthcoming when Farrell went to her. “Households,” she said. “There are four or five real ones—four, I guess, Rivendell keeps breaking up and starting over. They’re like communes, not even that organized. People sharing the rent, taking turns cooking, shopping, working in the garden, arguing over who changes the cat box this week. We’ve both lived in a dozen places like that.”

  “Except that we weren’t all playing the same game all the time.”

  Julie simply laughed at him. “Weren’t we? Come on, where you and I lived everybody was conspiring to bomb the Pentagon, or anyway jam up their plumbing. Or it was the great quest for the perfect plural marriage, the permanently correct position on Cuba, the all-time guru, the ultimate compost heap. It was just the same, Joe, just as uniform. And you fit in or you moved on to some other group.”

  “Did Prester John move on?” Farrell had lately taken to using the name like a depth charge, maliciously toppling it into placid conversation with League members and waiting to feel the water rupture and convulse far below the twinkling surface.

  But Julie said only, “I guess,” and went on fitting a new cartridge into one of her drawing pens. When Farrell pushed further, her voice abruptly became high and monotonous, whining with tension like an electric fence. “He freaked out, Joe, let it alone. He moved on, right. He overdosed on everything, one more Parnell burnout, all right? Let it alone.” There were tears swelling her eyes, shivering on the lower lids, and Farrell went to make tea.

  Since the dance, she had not accompanied him to any of the League functions, brusquely pleading either work or weariness. The Lady Criseyde had invited him to play for her weekly dance classes; and once he went alone to a crafts fair sponsored by the artisans’ and armorers’ guilds, and spent the day talking with pony-tailed boys who knew South German plate armor from Milanese, and Peffenhauser’s work from Colman’s, and with a former chemistry professor whose suits of armor weighed eighty pounds and sold for three thousand dollars. There were two swordsmiths and a specialist in the manufacture of mauls and flails, and there was one who only made the great padded gauntlets that most of the fighters used. Farrell learned that chopsticks were by far the best tools for packing the stuffing down in the glove, and that a one-pound lead
sinker made the most successful pommel weight for a tournament mace.

  Hamid and Lovita took him to his first tournament, which was staged in Barton Park, though not at the clearing where the Birthday Revels had been held. It was one of the League’s rare open exhibitions, and nonmembers in ordinary dress thronged among the cartoon-colored pavilions, the hedges of bemonstered appliqué banners, and the blazons strung on wire between the trees. Farrell saw Simon Widefarer cut down three novice knights trying to earn their spurs, and King Bohemond defend himself with surprising dexterity in the slow-motion ballet of maul-fighting. Garth de Montfaucon glided victorious out of a roaring mêlée, leaving four of his six opponents hobbling and gasping; and Farrell stood cold on tiptoe to see the ridiculous moustachios prowling down the lists, eyes squinted nearly shut, the lean body humping below the shoulders like a ferret’s body, or that of any other creature that found you in the earth by your smell. In the moment of Garth’s acclamation, his eyes sought out Farrell in the crowd, and he lifted his sword in mocking challenge. Farrell knew that it was only rattan, but its polished length gleamed in the sun like the real sword, Joyeuse, and he was glad when Garth turned away. Darrell Sloat. Remedial reading. Doesn’t help.

  He did bring Julie to dinner at Sia’s house and regretted it before the introductions were over. Strangers, the two of them reacted to each other with the immediate ease of long old detestation. Farrell spent the evening bridging grim silences by desperately teasing childhood reminiscences out of Ben, and in watching Sia probe and test and bait her guest more rudely than he had ever known her to do, while Julie responded with increasingly monosyllabic sarcasm. She went home early with a headache and hardly spoke to Farrell for two days. The most she ever said about that first encounter was, “We didn’t want to like each other. Leave it there.”