The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  Ben lowered his arms slowly, watching them all the way down, like the newly oiled Tin Woodman. “The League made it easier. Sort of like a singles bar.” It was Farrell’s turn to blink, and Ben smiled raggedly. “Common understandings. A sympathetic atmosphere. The luxury of knowing that only certain questions will be asked. But you’ve got it backwards, Joe. I had to invent Egil for them, as a character, an impression, just to be sure that whatever he did, people would always assume it was still me in my Viking hat. The League gave us a place to meet, you see, a place where nobody could ever think I was crazy. Whatever Egil did.”

  Farrell stepped back to let a heavy woman with a walking frame pass between them, looking sideways at the dogs and wrinkling her nose. “Give them a bath sometimes, why don’t you?” she said to Farrell. “Nobody likes to stink, people like you never think about that.”

  She was followed by two enlaced adolescents, trailing musk and saliva, and then by Farrell’s supervisor, who pointedly looked at his watch, bent slightly at the knees and inquired, “Woo-woo? Chugga-chugga? Ding-ding?”

  “Ding-ding right away,” Farrell agreed seriously. “I just have to see my friend to his car.” When the supervisor seemed disposed to debate, Farrell explained, “He’s having dizzy spells—I think it might be something he ate at the Elephants’ Graveyard,” and left him staring anxiously after them, already settling out of court. The supervisor had worked in better zoos than Barton Park, and the strain had been showing for some time.

  “You did drive here?” Farrell asked. Ben hesitated, then nodded. Farrell linked arms with him and started him moving toward the parking lot. “I mean, it’s okay for you to drive? Egil’s not likely to take over in the middle of an intersection, is he?” Trying to make a joke of it, he added, “You know how California is about expired licenses.”

  “He doesn’t take me over. I told you, it’s more like an exchange.”

  The patient instructor tone made Farrell flush so hotly that the skin of his face felt full of splinters. “Rubberlips, I don’t give a shit what you told me. I’ve seen him three times now, and each time you were long gone, you were busy taking him over in the ninth century.” Ben halted and opened his mouth to protest, but Farrell hurried him on. “I still don’t know what you’re really doing, or how you’re doing it, any more than that poor sucker Egil does, but I know fear, do you understand me? And I am truly ashamed of you, for the first time in my life, because I’ve never seen anybody as frightened as that man.” Except one other, the yellow-eyed man who came to Sia’s house. “You ought to be ashamed.”

  “You asshole, you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about!” They might have been squabbling over the rules of boxball on a Manhattan side street. Ben said, “I’m not hurting him. I could never hurt him. I love him.”

  “He was not consulted. Did he ever ask to be loved out of his own life?” Farrell was trembling himself, shaking Ben’s shoulder, peering into his eyes to find Egil’s incomprehensible torment. “He doesn’t know what’s happening to him—he must think he’s dying, going crazy, and he is going crazy, a thousand years ago. That’s an exchange? That’s love? That’s bloody fucking robbery, Ben.”

  “Don’t spit. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” They had reached the parking lot, and Ben was rocking on his heels as he gazed vaguely along the fish-spine rows of stalls.

  Farrell asked, “Why were you looking for me?”

  “I don’t remember.” Ben set off down the nearest row with the confidently off-balance air of a man lunging after a divining rod.

  Farrell followed, his voice a mosquito’s keen in his own ears. “Let it go. You have to let him go.” He touched Ben’s shoulder again and was startled anew at the sense of his friend’s cindery fragility. “Ben, it’s not good for you, either. Whatever you’re learning, whatever wonderful things, it’s not free. You can’t keep doing it, you’ll shatter, you’ll just dissolve, like him, you will. Ben, I know this.”

  Ben said, “I can’t find my goddamn car.” He turned and started back the way they had come, so abruptly that Farrell had to jump aside to let him by. His face was averted, but Farrell saw that one side of his mouth was wrong, dragged up and far back, exposing teeth. He said, “I left it here, I’m looking right at it. Son of a bitch.”

  They did not speak again until the car was finally located, at the far end of the lot. Ben approached it as warily as if it and he were both strange wild animals themselves. Something in that stiff, exhausted shuffle almost made Farrell cry, and he said, “I’d better drive you home. Both of you.”

  Ben shook his head and got into the car. Farrell gripped the open window as he started the engine. “What about Sia?” he demanded. “How does she feel about all this, what you’re doing? She doesn’t believe it’s seizures, that takes a silly person like me. Maybe I’ll talk to her myself, shall I do that, Ben? Because I don’t think she knows the whole story. I don’t think Sia would let you go on killing Egil out of love, not if she knew.”

  Ben looked up at him and then away. His free left hand moved from his throat to his mouth, a fist now, pushing as if he were trying to staunch a mortal wound. “You don’t understand. The seizures are the way, the seizures open the way. I never had them until her. They come from living in her house, sharing her bed, being in her thoughts. People aren’t supposed to do that, Joe. The gift is too great, we can’t contain it, we tear. But it’s a gift, a blessing, how can you say no to a blessing, even when it wasn’t meant for you? Don’t worry about Egil, Joe. Egil won’t die of it. It’s my blessing, after all.” The car slid through Farrell’s hands, and he was gone.

  Chapter 14

  The hawk’s feet were astonishingly hot. Farrell had braced himself for the skeletal clench on his fist, for the great black eyes considering him as if he had answered some strange want ad—look away a little, Frederik said not to stare—and even for the improbably soft breast feathers, smelling first like nutmeg and fresh straw, and then like old, clean bones in the sun. But he had only imagined the power and sharpness of the talons; never the heat shocking through the borrowed buckskin gauntlet, pulsating so immediately against him that he might have been balancing the redtail’s snaredrum heart on his skin. He let his breath out at last, and the Lady Criseyde placed her arm behind the hawk’s ankles, nudging very gently until the bird stepped back onto her glove. Farrell said, “How beautiful.”

  “Actually, you’re not seeing her at her best,” the Lady Criseyde said. “She started molting early this year, just to be contrary, and she’s so old and out of shape she probably couldn’t get off the ground on a bet. Could you, Strega?” The redtail said kack in a thoughtful way, still debating whether to hire Farrell.

  Behind him, Duke Frederik answered for her, “Good madame, five bucks says she takes a rabbit ere Micaela comes anywhere near a grouse.” He was adjusting the leather traces on the hood of a huge dark bird, taller and much wider-shouldered than the redtail Strega, with a hulking, ominous dignity that made Farrell think of Julie’s motorcycles. The dark hawk was irritable under Frederik’s hands, stamping and suddenly rousing every feather with the clatter of a Venetian blind. Frederik whispered and crooned her quiet; then he announced, “Okay, I think we ought to move out. Lord Garth and the Lady Aiffe don’t seem to be coming, and the dogs are getting crazy. In the name of King Bohemond and St. Whale, let’s roll.”

  There were nine of them, all in full costume, at the rendezvous point, along with two dogs and six birds—only Farrell, Julie, and Hamid ibn Shanfara had none. To the left, hidden by a windbreak of eucalyptus, the Coast Highway buzzed and muttered; directly ahead, summer-stubbly grassland, parched gray-green and gray-blue, stretched away toward an uncertain horizon. The members of the Falconer’s Guild moved in brisk solitude, each one sharing a windowless silence with the hooded creature hunched on his fist. Frederik alone remained cheerfully conversational, paying no obvious attention at all to Micaela, except to stroke her legs slowly now and then. “Sh
e’s a Canadian gyrfalcon,” he told Farrell and Julie. “They’re the biggest of the falcons and the fastest. She can’t dive like a peregrine, but on the flat, nothing comes near her.”

  “Weren’t they reserved for emperors?” Julie asked.

  Frederik shook his head. “Kings. Emperors and popes got to fly eagles. I had a golden eagle once, but I lost him.” For a moment his dark, asymmetrical face turned as private as the other faces. “His name was Saladin. I had no business with him. Hamid remembers.”

  “You going to tell me what I remember now?” Hamid asked mildly. He was dressed entirely in flowing white, turban to sandals, except for the red-hilted dagger thrust into his white sash. He went on, “What I do remember is, you didn’t lose that eagle. You let him go.”

  Frederik did not answer. The Lady Criseyde said quietly, “It’s the same thing, really. You’re always saying good-bye to hawks; every time you flip them off the fist, you have to say good-bye. It doesn’t matter how well you know them—they’re never yours to lose or to let go. They’ll come back if they feel like it. It’s always their choice.”

  The two pointers trotted along with a sedateness that surprised Farrell, who had never seen a professional bird dog at work. Dry grass pricked through the lacings of his soft shoes as he walked. Looking around at his companions in their cloaks and doublets and trunk-hose, cradling their hawks on one arm and their spike-tipped block perches with the other, he felt as if he were part of a religious procession on its way to reenact some vaguely sinister passion, whose lost significance only Hamid knew now. The impression was heightened by the fact that Hamid was telling him the story of St. Whale, the League’s patron, who came up out of the sea and walked like a man.

  “And St. Whale went up and down, doing great wonders in the land,” Hamid half sang in the rough, carrying murmur that he used for reciting League legends. “For he healed the sick, and he raised the dead, and he spoke to volcanos and made them be still. And he comforted the wronged and the helpless and was their protector. Hail St. Whale, walking on his tail.” The last phrase recurred constantly, like a refrain.

  Julie said, “I don’t remember the bit about the volcanos.” She was barely in costume, wearing tights, a loose smocklike blouse far too big for her, and an absurd purple beret, the size of a medium pizza, that had been Farrell’s once. The Lady Criseyde was letting her carry Strega, and she held the redtail close to her face, which worried Farrell.

  “Just now put it in,” Hamid said in his normal voice. “Got real tired of him planting apple trees and inventing tofu.” He fell back into the ritual cadences of the legend. “Yet behold, the mighty came together, and they said, one to the other, ‘Shall it continue so? Shall a sea beast with no understanding have the name of a miracle worker and draw away our subjects’ love unto himself? Nay, nay, not hardly, Jack.’ But the people said, Hail St. Whale, walking on his tail.”

  A rabbit bolted out of a greasewood thicket under the noses of the dogs, ran frantically parallel to the company for a moment, then vanished unmolested down a hole at the base of a live oak. It was the first sign of life that Farrell had seen in those crackling fields, and he had begun to wonder what the hawks would do for prey. Duke Frederik pointed, saying, “Overrun with them. All kinds of quail, too, and partridges. The guy stocked the place with chukars and pheasants years ago, trying to get the hunters to come out. It never really took—I think we’re about the only people who hunt here anymore—but it’s a candy store, if you happen to be a hawk.” He put his ungloved free fist gently against Micaela’s beak. She bit it briefly, but then rubbed her beak on his knuckles in an odd, twisting caress.

  Hamid chanted, “Now therefore the great gave their orders, that every knight in the land should ride against St. Whale, and every one rode accordingly, save for three knights who would not do so, for very shame, and these were slain. And they called on every weapon in the land, every sword and spear, dagger and axe and pike, every farmyard cudgel and sickle, that each of them should deal St. Whale a deadly blow. And this was done, except for seven swords that would not be used thus, and those of their own wills bent their blades and indeed became the only swords in human history ever transformed into ploughshares. Let us hail St. Whale, walking on his tail.” He smiled at Farrell, showing just the tips of his teeth.

  Duke Frederik halted on a slight rise, spiking the block perch into the earth as if he were claiming a continent for a king. He placed Micaela on it, but did not remove her hood. The dogs were showing excitement for the first time, leaning hard into their leashes and moaning softly. Farrell turned to see the other falconers swiftly setting up their own birds on their perches; the effect was still uneasily devotional on that tawny hillside. The bells on the hawks’ legs shivered in the little hot breeze, sounding like those of a distant caravan.

  At this shoulder, Hamid went on, indifferent to anything but story. “Now where St. Whale fell, his martyr’s blood soaked into the ground, and strange flowers sprang up instantly, such as had never been seen before. And they blossomed scarlet, with double petals like the flukes of a sounding whale, and they blossom still on that holy spot, every year on the day of the Whalemas Tourney. And each knight who takes part will wear one of those flowers at his crest, for this is how we remember St. Whale and honor him.” Several of the falconers joined him in the muttered refrain. “All hail St. Whale, walking on his tail.”

  The hawks were flown in an order set by Duke Frederik, each turn lasting until the bird had killed. Two of the six—the amiable Strega and a jittery young goshawk—were hawks of the fist, launched directly after fleeing rabbits and quail. The others were true falcons, with longer wings and disarmingly round faces, trained to “wait on,” circling almost out of sight of their attendants below. When the dogs, working in turn themselves, flushed prey into the air—“We call it serving,” Frederik said—they came down.

  Farrell had read often that a peregrine may be diving at two hundred miles an hour when it strikes its quarry. The number had no meaning for him until he first heard the impossible chattering howl of little bells ripping across space at that speed, and first saw a ruffed grouse apparently explode on impact, like a snowball. The peregrine settled daintily down through the swirling feathers, and a grinning, big-footed boy hiked up his monk’s habit and galloped forward to claim her. She went with him docilely, which seemed as fearful a miracle to Farrell as the sight of her burning out of pale heaven. One of the dogs was already casting greedily for fresh scent, while a Spanish wizard’s prairie falcon had begun its staggering climb into the wind, like a sailor going up ratlines hand over hand. Farrell lost track of her in the clouds, but the wizard unslung a pair of binoculars and followed slowly, taking off his glove and swinging it high to call her closer. Duke Frederik had unhooded Micaela. The gyrfalcon kept her eyes closed for a moment, then opened them so explosively that Farrell stepped back from the dark, living emptiness of her gaze.

  Frederik said, “Look at her. She balances between habit and what we’d call madness, and for her there’s no such thing as the future. I don’t think there’s really any present, either—there’s just the endless past going around and around her, over her and through her. When I hold her on the glove—” He indicated the leather jesses that leashed the falcon’s ankles. “—she’s more or less tied to my present, but the moment I let her go, she circles up into her real time. Her real time, where I never existed and where nothing’s extinct.”

  “And where fried pork rinds haven’t been invented yet,” the Lady Criseyde added. “That bird is not going anywhere they don’t have fried pork rinds.” Julie was sitting on the ground, sketching Micaela in the act of mantling, right wing and leg extended as far as possible. Farrell stood by her, sneaking side glances as she brought up the shadow of the great wing bones, the precise brown barring of the underfeathers, and the taut splay of the black primaries. Without looking at him, she said, “They ought to be here. It makes me very nervous that they aren’t here.”

>   “Aiffe,” Farrell said.

  Julie nodded. “And her father. He started the Falconers’ Guild, he never misses anything to do with hawks. It just bothers me.” Her two pencils, alternating rapidly, managed to suggest the curious dusty moth bloom on Micaela’s plumage.

  “Probably hatching up something nasty for the war. Isn’t he supposed to be one of the captains this year?”

  “In theory. Something else that makes me nervous is people watching me work.”

  Farrell moved pointedly aside, further than he needed to. She had been increasingly short with him since their night encounter with Micah Willows, and he had responded with injured huffiness. He said, “If you mean Aiffe’s going to be the real captain, she can’t come to the war. Even I know that.”

  Julie did not answer. Hamid flowed gracefully into the silence, saying, “Yeah, well. That’s kind of what the war’s about this year.” The Spanish wizard, still gesticulating into a seemingly empty sky, stepped in a rabbit hole and broke his binoculars. Hamid said, “The war will be fought to determine whether or not Garth de Montfaucon’s daughter can go to the war. Lord Garth issued the challenge last week, and Bohemond gave Simon Widefarer leave to accept. The kings don’t fight in the wars, but they have to approve time, place, ground rules, and cause. Bohemond settled on Cazador Island, first week in August.”

  The wizard’s falcon eventually stooped to take a partridge, and the Lady Criseyde went forward with Strega crouching on her wrist. Farrell said hesitantly, “But not this war. If her side wins, she gets to come to the next one. If she wins.”

  Hamid lifted one shoulder. “Considering she’s shown up at the last two, it’s kind of a fine point.” Julie turned to him quickly, startling Micaela, who promptly bated off Frederik’s fist, but scrambled back up unaided, hissing and flapping her wings. Hamid continued, “See, if she’d just be a good girl and keep on going in disguise, they’d be so happy to let it go. Like all the other times.” He smiled his narrow, alarming smile. “But Aiffe’s got something a little else in mind. She may not be anybody’s Helen of Troy, but she is damn sure the only adolescent I know who’s getting to have her very own war fought over her. You think she’ll miss that? I wouldn’t miss it.”