The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  On the eve of the summer solstice, they went together to the greenwood wedding of a psychiatric nurse called Sir Tybalt the Belligerent with the Lady Alisoun de la Fôret, a teaching assistant at the university. The marriage took place at sunset, on a beach where swimming had been indefinitely forbidden because of sewage spills. Basilisk played during the ceremony, which was performed by a barefoot mendicant friar, and Hamid sang Love Me or Not, Love Her I Must or Die afterward, with Farrell accompanying him and the costumed guests dancing slowly in a circle around the bride and groom. They then went on to the wedding feast, guided by two Italian mercenaries, one Druid, and two tumble-breasted Elizabethan strumpets who had all managed to crowd into Madame Schumann-Heink. Farrell drove as their tumultuous consensus directed him, further into the hills than he had ever gone, until he fishhooked around a blind curve into a wide avenue dotted with redwood condominium complexes, turned right again at a ranch-style church with a satellite dish on the lawn, and pulled up in the shadow of a canary-yellow castle. Beside him Julie said, “Storisende.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Farrell said softly. “I didn’t know they built any up this far.” There were banners floating over battlements and gargoyles smirking from the stone-framed entryway. He said, “The Avicenna castles. I’ve never been in one.”

  “A bunch of crazies built them in the twenties,” the Druid said over his shoulder. “Aleister Crowley freaks, or Theda Bara, somebody like that. Used to steal each other’s daughters. I read about it.” Farrell helped Julie down from the bus, and she handed him his lute, saying, “Joe, it’s a wedding. Just have fun, that’s what it’s for. That’s all it’s for.” She took firm hold of his arm, leading him toward the yellow castle.

  Storisende’s four stucco towers were set around a central courtyard, busy and close with trumpet vines, climbing rosemary, overhanging plane and fig trees, a miniature boxwood maze, mossy flagstones, and a fishpond the color of onion soup. The two towers at the back of the courtyard were themselves spired corners of a rambling, tile-roofed house that had apparently changed its mind and decided to be a Spanish mission instead of a Norman keep. The odors of jasmine, wild lilac, and oleander quarreled in Farrell’s nostrils, making him sneeze pleasantly. He broke off a sprig of jasmine, placed it in the cross-laced front of Julie’s blue velour gown, and kissed her when she looked up in surprise. “There, see,” he said. “I’m having fun already.”

  The marriage feast was going on in both rear towers, spilling back and forth through the main house in a tidal wash of laughter as flamboyant as a magician’s scarves, fiercely bawdy wedding catches, and the turned-earth smell of the League’s tongue-numbing homebrew. For all its blithely jumbled facade, the castle’s designer had done well with columns of sand and lime and air; the stone stairways were all external and the artfully bulging tower walls were thinner than they looked, leaving unexpected space for three stories’ worth of wide landings, and round or octagonal rooms as high as lofts, all of them aswirl with men and women whose clothes cast the shadows of great, brawling birds. Farrell drew the lute quickly against him, not simply to shield it from collisions, but to still the voices that rioted in the sentient wood and made it whimper angrily in his arms.

  He lost Julie almost immediately to a pair of young girls dressed in the gold-heavy robes of Scythian nomads, who swarmed up to her crying, “Lady Murasaki, the Nine Dukes, all are here, all, hast ever seen such a wedding?” and dragged her off to join in a women’s chorus engaged in singing their own songs of carnal counsel to the bride. Farrell roamed the rush-strewn floors at fascinated random, constantly striving to down one full mug of ale before someone’s robe or sword hilt knocked it out of his hands. One room was largely given over to a buffet table burdened with platters of conger in souse, beef marrow fritters, meat tiles, friants, numble pie and florentine; in another, an intense argument concerning Senate candidates, couched entirely in the imaginary language of the League—“God’s teeth, sirrah, beshrew me, but I’ll put it to thee plain, thy man’s naught but a mewling, doddering old puppet of the military-industrial complex”—had half a dozen weapons clear of their sheaths by the time the noble Duke Frederik the Falconer could intervene.

  A third room did its best to contain the admirers of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, as she held her own court, clad in nothing much but her two languorous pythons, Vlad and Bela. Lovita Bird, herself dressed entirely in interlaced bands of tooled white leather, was standing to one side, looking contemptuously amused. Farrell eased up to her and murmured, “Come on, Vlad’s kind of a dip, but Bela’s all right. Or maybe that’s Vlad.”

  Lovita curled exactly half of an exquisite upper lip. “Both of them a sight better-looking than the best day she ever saw. Woman’s got no more shame than she got shape.” She snorted delicately, which Farrell had never seen done.

  “Hamid says those snakes are League members. Hamid jives me a lot.”

  “It’s the truth. Associate members, sibyls to the king or some such. Poor old Bohemond, he’s got to bring them those lab rats, offerings, and he’s supposed to ask their advice on things. Says so right there in the bylaws.”

  Garth de Montfaucon strolled past with his arm around the bride and a side-glance like a paper cut. Farrell said to Lovita Bird, “You look great in that outfit. Did you make it yourself?”

  “I look great in a whole lot of outfits,” she said comfortably. “But thank you. Yeah, I made this one, I make most of the stuff I wear here. Keeps me in mind that I’m Amanishakhete Queen of Nubia and no damn bus driver. Can’t afford to be forgetting that.”

  Farrell stared, considering her slender brown arms and small hands. “That’s what you do? You drive a school bus?”

  “In a pig’s coochie, honey.” Lovita Bird patted his hand. “Metro Transit, eight hours a day hauling one of those big, whonking, articulated mothers across two county lines and the damn Bay Bridge. Throw them off when they’re drunk, they stick me up when they’re stoned, call me names when they’re straight. You think I could stand that shit if I thought it was real life?”

  Aiffe’s laughter prickled around the edges of everything, rubbing raw places in the joyous evening. Farrell had glimpsed her two or three times, usually slipping between couples like a memory, teasing either the man or the woman away with her, to dance or to whisper. He had not seen Nicholas Bonner anywhere.

  He moved on quickly to sit in a corner with several children, who were playing a strange game, juggling walnuts from hand to hand. All were in full costume, kirtled and tabarded miniatures of their elders, and even the very youngest among them spoke the League talk as fluently as the adults, and more naturally. Farrell learned that they belonged to the three families who made up the household of Storisende; two of them had been born in the stucco castle. As was usual, the girls served Queen Leonora as maids of honor, while the boys went as pages or squires, depending on their ages. All their references centered on League realities, whether they were describing a tournament at “the fair realm of Broceliande in the North”—Farrell thought they might mean Seattle—or merely fussing at one another over the sharing of sticky spun-sugar dulces. Yet when Farrell asked them where they went to school, they fell effortlessly into standard California English, chattering about grades and recess enemies as eagerly as they had just debated the order of precedence at a royal banquet. Farrell found this dizzying, like hitting an air pocket.

  At the buffet, while discovering that the thick meat custard called mortrews had enough of a slow-acting, spicy kick to set fire to his teeth, he was accosted by a large, smiling woman, sweetish and powdery as a marshmallow. She wore a full-sleeved, fur-embroidered black robe that touched the floor, a huge, teetering headdress of gauze and wire, and a golden belt with a ring of a good dozen keys that clattered like knives whenever she moved. “Sir Musician, you should be with your fellows,” she scolded him gaily. “Musickers are all for playing while their lords dine, to sweeten their digestion with their gladsome airs; it were scandalous anarchy
otherwise.” She slapped his arm lightly and handed him a turnover in the shape of a crowned swan.

  “Lady, my comrades are also at their meat,” he answered, pointing out the Basilisk crew with their wooden trenchers as laden as his. Across the room, John Erne’s Nisei pupil, the Ronin Benkei, nodded soberly to him, and Lovita Bird waved a jellied eel. The smiling woman said, “Now you are the Lady Murasaki’s man, the Knight of Ghosts and Shadows. I am called Janet of Carterhaugh, chatelaine of Storisende.”

  Farrell, who had often sung the Scots ballad of the young girl who rescued her lover, body and soul, from the power of the Queen of the Fairies, could not help raising his eyebrows. The woman laughed outright, apparently unoffended. “Nay, do I not suit your imagining? Well, I am only recently become the Lady Janet—as late as the Birthday Revels I was still Draja the Tartar, raider and rebel, pitiless enemy of all who dare her mountain fastness.” Farrell remembered her, a shrilling apparition in a red wig and gilded leather mail, clutching two spears even when she danced. “But it got so boring,” the Lady Janet went on. “Say what you will, there’s no one really likes a constant outlaw, and the whole life style is just dull after a while. So I packed up Draja, bag and baggage—all her weapons, her armor, all her nasty little gods and charms and endless family legends, and her one bloody company formal—and I just sold her to Margrethe von der Vogelweide, who is so tired of being Duke Manfred’s operetta duchess she’ll take to any hills she can find. And behold, the demure but passionate Janet of Carterhaugh, who defied all Elfland for her love, and dresses much better than poor Draja besides.” She made him a deep and unexpectedly elegant curtsy and rose winking.

  Farrell said slowly, “You can do that? Just stop being whoever you are in the League and decide to be someone absolutely different? You can sell characters, trade them off?” He felt oddly disoriented, almost offended.

  “Personas,” the Lady Janet corrected him. “Or we call them impressions. Aye, of a certainty, we barter and alter and retire them as we choose, and no constraint but to register the change with the College of Arms.” Her sugar-white face grew damply pink as she continued. “I’faith, ‘twould be intolerable else. What, should we be bound eternally to the same outworn impression, any more than to a single manner of dress, to one ambition, one mate, one nose? This may be the Middle Ages, good musicker, but it is still California.”

  A Siamese kitten who had been fearlessly scampering through all the rooms at once all evening bounced stifflegged up to them to investigate the wonderful secrets of the Lady Janet’s trailing hem. She swooped him up to nip fiercely at her chin, telling Farrell, “Behold Sir Mordred, so named because he is so wicked, wicked, wicked.” The last words were half smothered in the kitten’s fur.

  Farrell asked, “Does that happen a lot? I mean, are people changing their characters all the time?”

  The Lady Janet laughed into Sir Mordred’s belly, and he promptly boxed her ears. “Nay, ‘tis hardly as common as that. There are many like the Lady Criseyde or the Lord Garth, whose impressions vary not a jot from one Whalemas Tourney to the next, except to grow richer and more sure. But for those of us more fickle, the true delight lies in becoming exactly whom we choose, as deeply as we choose, and for exactly as long. Before Draja, I was Lucia la Sirena, flame of old Castile, and I may well be Marian of Sherwood tomorrow, or Melusine the Dragon Lady, and no one to look twice at me for it. Squire Tancred, Geoffrey of Eastmarch, will you knock it off?”

  Two of the boys Farrell had been chatting with earlier came hurtling past the buffet, half-racing, half-wrestling, yelling in breathless, hysterical voices, “Caitiff, miscreant, I’ll have thy guts for garters!” Sir Mordred snarled, slashed the air indignantly, and tried to climb the Lady Janet’s headdress. One boy managed to wave apologetically to her as they vanished under the table; miraculously, they scrambled out on the other side without crashing into the legs or pulling the cloth and trays down with them. Farrell could follow their riotous progress across the room by the wave of robes and gowns being swept hastily out of their way.

  “Toenails of the Virgin, a murrain on the pair of them!” the Lady Janet spluttered as Farrell carefully removed Sir Mordred from her hair and set him on the floor. “E’er since Tancred became squire to Cedric the Bowman, the brat’s been tormenting my Geoffrey to distraction. Pox on’t, but I must needs go deal with the wretched little rug-rats.” She curtsied again to Farrell and began to turn away.

  “You live here,” Farrell said. “What’s it like for you, living here all the time?” The Lady Janet looked back at him saying nothing, smiling now. Farrell asked, “I mean, do you eat out much? Do you have friends where you work, do you and your family ever go to the movies, do you take the car in for tuneups? What is it like all the time?” Why should I be the one feeling like an idiot? Am I the one with a kid fighting over who gets to be a squire?

  The Lady Janet paused and fanned her damp bosom, all the while watching Farrell out of steady small eyes the color of faded denim. She said, “I know how to put quarters in a parking meter, if that’s your notion of the real world. I have to know that, because we have no student lot at my law school. I can also balance a checkbook, send out for pizza, and help Geoffrey of Eastmarch with his computer class homework. Does that answer your question, my Lord of Ghosts and Shadows?”

  A sudden sharp rise in the noise level made both of them turn quickly to see a burly knight in full chain mail hoisting himself onto the buffet table, kicking a chair over behind him as he did so. He gripped a slopping flagon in one hand and was beginning his speech or his song—it was difficult to be sure—with one booted foot in the frumenty. Even through the redoubled cheering and stamping, Farrell could hear the Lady Janet’s squall of outrage as she charged the buffet, reverting instantly to Draja the Tartar. The knight saw her coming, dropped his flagon, and started to climb down.

  Farrell drifted on, looking for Julie and trying not to step on Sir Mordred, who kept exploding out of shadows to launch ruthless kamikaze attacks on Farrell’s ankles and vanish instantly behind a mounted suit of armor or a half-painted shield leaning in a corner. One of the assaults was providential, diverting the attention of the Lady Vivienne d’Audela, who was just settling in for a good teary chat about her hopeless crush on Hamid ibn Shanfara. Another effectively broke up an impromptu Basilisk rendition of “When I’m Sixty-Four,” performed as a serenade to Sir Tybalt and the Lady Alisoun, caught necking in an alcove. Farrell had a serious talk with the kitten at that point, and Sir Mordred promised faithfully to be good, but he lied.

  The Lady Criseyde, involved in hasty repairs to the gravysplashed ruff of King Bohemond, paused to say that the Lady Murasaki had gone out but now into the courtyard, complaining of the noise and stuffiness. A branle was forming in the hallway like a fifteenth-century conga line, accompanied only by Felix Arabia on shawm, resembling a Bosch demon in a genial moment. He caught sight of Farrell and called to him, beckoning over the dozen cowls, plumed berets, and steepled hennins jigging between them. Farrell smiled, waved back, and ducked swiftly across the hall into a room he had not seen before. It was smaller than the others, less well-lighted, with a smell of old neglect about it, as if every celebration since the housewarming had passed it by. Yet there were fresh rushes scattered here, too—where do you go to get real castle rushes in Avicenna, California?—and a few tapestries and small rugs taking a bit of the chill from the walls; and by the far wall, directly under the one stone slash of a window, Nicholas Bonner crouched on the floor with a boy who could not have been older than four. They were building a castle of their own together out of red and yellow bricks.

  Farrell never knew how long he stood watching them. The room was rarely deserted; he was distantly but continually aware of people, wandering in and out, and of voices joking in the League talk about the perfect concentration of the two children. Neither one ever looked up. Farrell recognized the boy as the Lady Alisoun’s nephew and solemn-eyed ringbearer. Nicholas was teaching him
the words for the different parts of the castle as they took shape in clicking red and yellow. “There we are, Joshua, that’s the barbican all done. Can you say that, barbican?” Joshua giggled and said it correctly. “Oh, very good. Okay, now we have to make a proper postern gate in our curtain wall—postern, Joshua, I’ll do that one, and you put a few more guard towers on the wall, okay? You do good towers.”

  He was dressed with casual richness in red and black trunk-hose, puffed like pumpkins at the hips, a short darkred doublet over a plain white shirt, suede half-boots, and a high-crowned black hat that looked exactly like a soft upside-down flower pot. The angle of the narrow brim hid his eyes. Joshua still wore his ice-cream-white wedding suit, along with the space helmet that had apparently been the price of his performance. He lasted through the remodeling of the curtain wall, but fell asleep while the moat and causeway were being added. Nicholas Bonner laughed gently, almost without a trace of the greedy, prowling sweetness that Farrell remembered, and picked him up so carefully that the boy never stirred. Farrell stepped back instinctively as the golden face turned toward him, but Nicholas was looking down at Joshua and his eyes were still in shadow. Someone across the room was telling someone else how and when to buy silver. Nicholas Bonner began to hum very softly.

  A muscular little tail whipped once against Farrell’s foot and he whirled, Sir Mordred’s ambushes having left him more than a trifle gun-shy. But the Siamese was after wilder game, ignoring Farrell as he stalked past him to move in boldly and openly on Nicholas Bonner’s long, graceful legs in their tempting trunk-hose. Far from erupting all over them, clinging like Greek fire for a moment, then leaping away to safety, Sir Mordred sized up his prey in the leisurely manner of a much older cat, taking all the time necessary to unsheathe his claws, blow on them, adjust for windage and elevation, and finally reach out to draw them daintily down Nicholas’ left leg from calf to ankle, like a bear marking a tree. And he looked upon his work, saw that it was good—four neat slits in the red hose, and scratched skin showing through—and he sat back, deeply content, and said, “Rao.”