The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  Strega was justifying the Lady Criseyde’s earlier cynicism, completely ignoring the rabbits that were flushed for her and showing no inclination to do anything as foolishly wearying as flying, let alone taking prey. She had to be literally shaken off the fist and each time she grumbled along for no more than thirty yards before plumping down abruptly to huff out her feathers and talk to herself. The Lady Criseyde finally picked her up, telling Frederik, “I’ll try her again last, after Micaela. Some of us are just spoiled beyond belief.” Over her shoulder Farrell saw three figures coming across the field.

  Nicholas Bonner was carrying a bird, brandishing it like a torch on a block perch almost as long as himself. Farrell took it at first for a hawk, damn big hawk too, even this far away. Then Julie made a sound, and Farrell let himself register the round, concave face, round eyes as big and hard and shadowless as military brass buttons, and the twin tufts that resembled wild, theatrically slanted eyebrows more than horns or ears. It sat motionless, never once hooting or spreading its wings; but on Duke Frederik’s glove, Micaela the gyrfalcon suddenly screamed like a bent nail tearing out of a board.

  Looking left and right, Farrell saw that every hawk was being hastily hooded by its owner to keep it calm in the presence of the owl. Micaela herself was the only exception. Duke Frederik held her gently against his chest, murmuring her silent, watching Aiffe, Nicholas, and Garth de Montfaucon approach. Somebody complained, “You can’t fly one of those things. I never heard of anybody flying one of those.” Julie closed her sketch pad and came to stand beside Farrell. The back of her hand brushed his, as shockingly cold as the hawks’ feet were hot.

  Aiffe almost danced the last dozen yards, skipping ahead of her companions to pounce into a deep curtsy before Duke Frederik and the Lady Criseyde. “Pardon, pardon, pardon,” she cried in her sweet, twangling whine. “The tardiness was most shameful, yet truly no fault of ours. The great wood-devils are none so easy to come by, search as a poor witch will.” She was dressed heavily for the summer day in burgundy velvet that hung like a sandwich sign on her thin frame. Yet she moved with graceful assurance in it, standing up swiftly to fling one arm wide, gesturing toward the horned owl sitting so still on Nicholas Bonner’s perch. She said, “My lord, gentles all, will you not now welcome me into your most noble fellowship? I mean, do I have a bird here or do I have a bird?” Behind her, Nicholas Bonner smiled at Farrell like an old friend.

  Micaela screamed at the owl again, and Frederik drew his cloak partly around her. “Lady Aiffe, this is more than a marvel.” The only change that Farrell could hear in his even voice was a lowering in pitch and an early-morning roughness in the tone. “To hold such a creature as this—”

  “Without jesses,” Aiffe interrupted loudly. “Take note, everyone, nothing commands my wood-devil, nothing keeps him out in fullest daylight among his enemies, nothing but our agreement.” The genuine dignity informing her own voice kept being sabotaged by spiteful delight, shredding into laughter like a torn sail in a storm. Yet when she said, “Now we will go hunting with you,” there was the slightest questioning tilt to the words, the smallest temblor of vulnerability, touching Farrell by surprise. She wants in so terribly.

  Duke Frederik said, “We are the Falconers’ Guild. Even if your bird might by arts magical be trained to fly from the fist, for there’s no owl born could ever learn to wait on—”

  “Either one,” she challenged him joyously. “Either way. If I bid him circle over my head all the day, at a mile’s height or a handbreadth, then circle he shall until I cry stoop and take. What would you have him do, my masters? We are at your orders, he and I.”

  In the silence that followed, the horned owl hooted for the first time, still not moving except to close its eyes. The breeze shifted in the same moment, bringing Farrell the owl’s cold indoor smell, rooms where you put things you don’t want to think about. The Lady Criseyde began to say, “By every form and law of our fraternity—”

  But Garth de Montfaucon’s voice raked across hers like a slash of brambles. “The law? I founded this wretched guild, and you would read me its regulations? There is nothing in the law forbidding my daughter’s bird to hunt with your own, and right well you know it, my lord Duke.” He had stepped in front of Aiffe and was glaring at Frederik, his gaunt, tight face twisting like a drill bit. He said, “All that is required, all, is that the bird be of age and condition to take prey. There is not a single word concerning species. She could fly a duck if she so chose, and if its disposition were suitable, and none to bar her. You know this.”

  Nicholas Bonner touched Aiffe’s shoulder, and she turned to him. Farrell could not hear what they were saying, but Nicholas was nodding at the owl, grinning his branding-iron grin, while Aiffe kept edging irritably away from him. Duke Frederik repeated, his voice increasingly hoarse and slow, “We are the Falconers’ Guild. The rule is implicit in the name, as it always was.”

  Someone bumped Farrell from behind, and he turned to realize that the entire company were gradually drawing together, none looking at the next, cradling their hawks against themselves like maimed limbs. Even Hamid had moved close enough that Farrell could see the sharp brown cord jumping in his throat. Nicholas Bonner raised the horned owl’s perch slightly higher, and the bird hooted again, spreading wings as black and gray as Sia’s hair, wings so wide that the round body between seemed smaller than it was, almost fragile next to Micaela’s burliness. Garth de Montfaucon said wonderingly, “Implicit? Nay, what is implicit among such creatures as these, save what they do? What further aristocracy within a fellowship of killers and the lackeys of killers?” Duke Frederik began to answer him, but Garth wheeled away, snapping his fingers at Nicholas Bonner. “My lady daughter’s wood-devil will hunt now!”

  No member of the Falconer’s Guild ever gave the same account of the following ten seconds. The Lady Criseyde swore bitterly that Nicholas Bonner had shaken the owl violently into the air, deliberately frightening and enraging it, while Julie remained forever certain that she had seen Aiffe herself calmly ordering the bird like any falconer with a glance and a single curt gesture. The Spanish wizard and the boy with the peregrine both claimed that the owl had flown up of its own volition before Garth finished speaking, though the boy insisted on its having actually hovered for an improbable instant until Nicholas Bonner’s cold cry sent it floating to the attack. As for Hamid ibn Shanfara, he said only, “Magic won’t cover up stupidity. You don’t have to be a witch to figure what’s likely to happen if you go shoving a horned owl in a falcon’s face. Magic didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

  But what Farrell remembered was Aiffe’s hands. Long after time had taken such details as the undersea silence of the owl’s strike, the bronze eyes that never came fully open in the midday sun, even when Micaela rose shrieking through Duke Frederik’s desperate grasp, and the single dreamy flex of the flowering talons just before they took Micaela by the neck, Farrell remembered the triumph and misery of Aiffe’s hands. They had lunged upward with the owl in a clenched glory of control; but when they fell, they stopped at her mouth, palms out, fingers curling slowly, and remained there until the Lady Criseyde finally stood up with the gyrfalcon’s blood on her cheeks and the front of her gown. Then Aiffe’s hands came all the way down, and she held them flat against her sides, smiling like a queen on view while the Lady Criseyde cursed her. In Farrell’s memory of that moment, there was never any other sound, except later, when the owl began calling from the trees.

  Chapter 15

  To one’s surprise or understanding, Farrell’s supervisor at the zoo was discovered early one morning in the Nocturnal Animals House, curled up on a ledge between a couple of drowsily annoyed kinkajous. He was given an indefinite leave of absence, and everyone even remotely connected with him was fired within the week, as if sad puzzlement were contagious. Farrell counted himself lucky not to be sprayed with pesticide and applied for an opening that Jaime, the peanut vendor, had told him about at an antique automobi
le restoration shop. The pay was less than at the zoo, and it meant being indoors more, but he liked the job from the first day, finding it delicately exhausting, oddly comforting work. The shop was close to the campus, so he usually had lunch with Julie.

  “It isn’t so much anything I do,” he told her after a fortnight at the shop. “Mostly I just find parts and stick them on—the owners do the complicated stuff. But the air inside those cars is sixty years old. You open a door and somebody’s croquet summer comes billowing out at you. Teddy Roosevelt. Lydia Pinkham.”

  “It’s always the smell,” Julie said. “All that hot, prickly upholstery just absorbed everything, sunlight and cigarette smoke, sweaty legs. I remember—when I smell an old Pontiac now, I think about my Uncle Mashi, but when I was little I used to think that Uncle Mashi smelled like an old Pontiac.”

  Farrell nodded. “Maybe he did. Things get mixed up. The people who bring their cars into the shop, a lot of them look like the people who first bought those cars. It’s the clothes, partly, because they have fun dressing up to the cars, but it’s the faces more. They keep coming in, right out of those old summers, those brown family photographs. The way the League people look like paintings. I keep seeing them.”

  “It’s what happens in groups,” she said. “People who get together because of a hobby or an obsession start to look a certain way. Boat people, backpackers, science fiction types, comic book collectors. Even short-wave radio freaks sort of have a look.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Farrell said slowly. “I think I’m talking about people who mess with time, whether they know it or not. It’s like what Frederik said—maybe there’s really no present, just the past looping on and on. Yesterday I had to take some of the original paint off a 1912 Taylor, off the door, and all the time I was chipping and soaking and scraping that lovely, tough old paint away, I swear I could feel someone else putting it on. By hand, in a converted livery stable. I know how Frederik feels watching those hawks go up into time. Everything’s so close to everything else.”

  He stopped, leaving a ragged hole in the conversation, through which Julie regarded him steadily and unsparingly. For the first time, he noticed a tiny triangular golden fleck in one brown iris that was not duplicated in the other. Her hair’s not as black as it used to be, in this light. Was it ever? She said, “Even if I do resign from the League, you don’t have to. That’s entirely your business.”

  “For what it’s worth, she didn’t really mean to kill Micaela,” Farrell said. “She was showing off.” The Falconers’ Guild had effectively disbanded within minutes of the gyrfalcon’s death, leaving Aiffe mistress of her father’s bylaws and a field strewn with torn rabbits and partridges. “I just don’t think she really meant it,” he repeated. “What the hell would have been the point?”

  Julie said loudly and abruptly, “We have been through this discussion before.” She started to stand up, bumped her chair against the one behind her, knocked over Farrell’s carrot juice and spent the next few moments helping him to mop it up, all the while snarling, “Didn’t mean it? She means every damn thing she does, always has, ever since she learned how to make a boy who pulled her hair in fifth grade pull all his own hair out, snatch himself baldheaded.” The tables were as close and crowded as her words, and Farrell heard chair legs and Earth Shoes scraping as customers turned to stare. Julie said, “You really think you feel sorry for her. Poor Aiffe, poor skinny little twit, trying so hard to live up to this absurd, misplaced talent that keeps getting away from her. That’s not even pity, that’s contempt, and contempt is what gets people killed, do you hear me, Joe? She’ll do to you exactly what she did to that hawk, for exactly the same reason. To make you take her seriously.”

  “I take her very seriously,” he protested.

  But Julie was a flash flood, never giving him a moment to grab onto a rhetorical tree root or floating log. “The point? The point is that thing you keep missing, the point is power. Power doesn’t need to explain itself, power is all about not explaining. Power just does because it can.”

  Farrell overtipped a grinning, green-bearded waiter and followed her out to the sidewalk where any number of people were patiently tracing the transparent logic of the universe for one another. Julie stalked along ahead of him, shoulder bag flapping like a traffic light in a gale, her shoulders themselves cranked up higher than her chin. Sellers of ceramic whales and stained-glass jewelry leaped out of her way, but a frock-coated street corner mime danced along beside her, aping her furious passage. Julie hacked his ankle when he got too close.

  By the time Farrell caught up with her, the strange fury of frustration seemed to have passed, and she walked quietly beside him until they were crossing the campus toward her office. Frisbees climbed languidly over head, waiting on, and bicycles exploded silently past their faces, silver-quick as barracudas, giving no warning. By contrast, their riders appeared almost illusory, incidental, having nothing to do with the vicious purposefulness of the bicycles. Farrell said at last, “I don’t understand.” She turned her head inquiringly, and he said, “I don’t even know what I don’t understand. Tell me.”

  Julie turned away to hail a sedately jogging security guard and feed stale cookies to Buddy Holly, the campus’s swaggering Toulouse goose, before she answered him. “Aiffe is a lot more dangerous than her ambitions. You dismiss her because all she wants right now is to reign over something called the League for Archaic Pleasures. But what matters, Joe, what matters is how badly she wants it.” She faced him, gripping his arms just below the shoulders, digging in hard enough to rock him slightly off-balance. “You know how people say, ‘I’d kill to have legs like that, I’d kill to get that job, to get next to him’? Yes, well, Aiffe means it. To wear a crown that looks like a damn sand castle, to lead galliards, to go in to dinner ahead of a lot of fools in fancy long johns—Rosanna Berry would indeed kill for that. Maybe tomorrow she’ll kill to be Homecoming Queen.”

  Farrell said flatly, “I don’t believe it. Him, yes, her father, like a shot, no question about it. But her, I’m sorry—I’ve seen her make a total fool of herself, I’ve seen her embarrass people stupidly and make an owl sort of obey her, and she is running around with somebody she called out of somewhere who should definitely not be here. I’m willing to believe that she can do a great many more things, but I still haven’t seen her come anywhere near killing anybody. And if you have, I think you’d better tell me.” His voice had grown louder, and he shrugged her hands away, stepping back.

  “I keep telling you,” she said. “More damn people keep telling you things, it’s really amazing.”

  She walked on toward the medical buildings, and Farrell tagged after her, snarling, “Right, right, don’t they ever? And isn’t it odd that not one of them can ever give me a straight answer? Ask for the time of day, I’m liable to find out the Duke of Minestrone took it with him when he locked himself in the john ten years ago. Ask for the bus stop, you get a treasure map of a lost kingdom.” He knew perfectly well that he sounded like a put-upon adolescent, but he kept on complaining until they reached her office.

  There she turned again and smiled at him with a sudden generosity that stopped his breath. I don’t know her. All this time of being friends, and I could make a better guess at what goes on inside Sia or Egil Eyvindsson, or, my God, Nicholas Bonner, than I could about her. Who is she, and how does a speechless foreigner get to meet her? She said, “In the first place, you’ve got it backwards about Garth and Aiffe. He can’t do anything but bruise you with a wooden sword, but once I saw her do something that was worse than killing, and I’ll never forgive her for it. In the second place, old love, you get a straight answer with a straight question. And I don’t think you’ve ever asked a straight question in all your life.”

  She left him there, outraged denial on his lips and panic in his heart, thinking, If I don’t know her, how come she knows me? Who said it was all right for her to know me? I never agreed to that. And then he thought, It’
s probably too late now. To agree. Probably.

  She did not resign from the League then, but she attended so few of their functions that Farrell was mildly astonished when she agreed to accompany him to a dance in honor of the visiting King and Queen of Hyperborea, the Sacramento branch. The evening passed uneventfully—Aiffe and Nicholas were nowhere in evidence—except for King Bohemond spraining his back hoisting the Queen of Hyperborea during la volta. Farrell and Julie came home later than they had planned, singing old rhythm-and-blues songs together for the first time in a long while.

  Parnell Street seemed curiously still, a night beach at low tide. The tall black man, swaying in the crosswalk where Farrell had first seen him, looked like a winter-whipped beach umbrella in his dirty striped djellaba. He would undoubtedly have fallen, even without the aid of the two shadows who were dragging him down, one almost swinging from his neck, the other kicking viciously at his legs. A car passed from the opposite direction, pulling carefully wide so as not to hit anyone.

  Farrell stopped Madame Schumann-Heink where she was, and he and Julie grabbed whatever seemed appropriate on the way out of the bus. Micah Willows’ attackers looked up to see two improbable figures charging down upon them, cloaks flying, high boots rattling and snapping on the pavement, plumed hats half hiding lunatic faces, gauntleted hands waving tire irons and crescent wrenches. They had been having enough trouble with their victim’s African caftan, which tangled their own hands like seaweed, and it was all suddenly more than they cared to handle, just at the moment. Julie fired Farrell’s best lug wrench into the darkness after them, and he never found it again.