The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  Aiffe’s five summonings made straight for him, and he took them on as they came, in pairs or all at once, sometimes using the axe handle like a quarterstaff to crack their heads and ribs, sometimes driving them before the whimpering crescent of the blade, never giving them a moment to gather themselves for the kind of fighting they knew, but battering them ceaselessly with a toy which could never have broken the skin. Farrell realized later that they must surely have known the terror of the berserker in their own time, and that it was this that routed them, and not so much the fact that Ben knocked the Venetian briefly senseless with one end of the longaxe, then caught the Norman full amidships with the other and drove him out through the gate like a croquet ball. That was the true end of the War of the Witch; the other four simply followed him, professionals cutting their losses. Aiffe ran at them, shouting, but they were already long gone into the darkening air, clearly seeking the place where they had lurched from a reasonable world to this one. Farrell thought he saw them find it, just before the trees hid them.

  Yet he was to wonder a little, imagining them stranded here like Mansa Musa, poor free-lances, slurped up onto Parnell Street to roam crazy among the pretend crazies and the half crazies, among the quiet young men dreaming about killing somebody morally. They might do just fine, what do I know? Maybe it happens a lot more than I think. Probably wind up in Central America. He never saw them again, nor ever wanted to, but he never quite stopped looking.

  Simon’s final charge, trapping Garth and his surviving knights between the sword and Ben’s axe, was utterly anticlimactic for everyone involved. When the head referee bawled, “Sunset and hold!” the plywood castle—dissolving now at all four corners, and with two walls tottering—remained in the possession of some dozen filthy, laughing men sitting on the ground. They raised a cheer, faint and thickthroated and mocking; and Ben became still at last, staring around him with a sick, flinching face, letting the longaxe trail to the ground. The head had been wrenched sideways on the splintering haft, and Farrell saw torn leather windings and a snowy dribble of plastic foam.

  There was little sense of celebration. Dead men rose up and dusted themselves, chatting about weapons with their breathless killers, while the two medical students who served as paramedics dressed and bandaged real wounds, increasingly inexplicable. Prisoners drifted in through a deepening mist to arrange ransom terms; some tidying was done, and even a certain amount of dutiful ale-drinking and singing of victory. Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner had vanished with the sun. In time several men went to find Crof Grant.

  Not a mark was on the body, nor was there any blood on the leaves where he lay. Ben and Farrell stood together on the island’s abrupt shore, watching the first rowboat heave away toward the lights. Nearby, Hamid ibn Shanfara was chanting a lament for all the fallen, as he did each year. “Gaily went they to the gods, this morning’s comrades.” The saffron shirt gleamed pink for an instant until the shadows took it.

  Farrell said, “I kept hoping that somebody from another time couldn’t really kill somebody in this one.” Ben did not answer, and Farrell felt compelled to keep talking. “Well, Sia called it, after all,” he said. “Sia and Hamid.”

  When Ben turned, his face was fifteen years old, an eggshell of pain. “They called two different deaths,” he said. “Egil’s gone.”

  Farrell stared at him. The naked face said, “He’s dead. Egil’s dead. I felt him die.”

  Farrell touched his shoulder, but Ben moved away. “You mean, you lost contact, the connection got broken. Is that it?” Right, Farrell. Of course that’s it. He wanted to put his arms around Ben, as he had seen Ben hold Sia, but he was afraid to.

  “I mean he’s dead,” Ben said, “In his time, his real time, at the age of thirty-nine.” Farrell started to speak, then let him continue, anticipating the question. “I don’t know what he died of. I’ll never know. People died all the time back there in the ninth century; thirty-nine was getting on. But I’ll always think he died of me. Of what I did to him, what I made him do. I mean, maybe I wore him out, gave him an ulcer, a heart condition, a stroke.” His face convulsed suddenly, but no tears came. “I felt him die, Joe. I was trying to brace the gate, and he died.”

  “That’s why you were calling his name like that.” Ben was scrubbing furiously at his mouth with the edge of his fist, scouring away the taste of death. Farrell said, “You don’t know you killed him. You don’t, Ben.”

  The fifteen-year-old face turned toward him again, oddly swollen and lumpy in the dusk, as if swallowed sorrow had produced an allergic reaction. Ben was smiling slightly. He said, “You see, if I don’t know, I’ll wonder about it for the rest of my life. If I accept the fact that I really killed him, killed him a thousand years ago, then maybe I can stop thinking about it one day. Doesn’t seem too likely, but maybe.”

  “Will you for God’s sake cry?” Farrell demanded. “You’re going to hurt yourself if you don’t cry.” But Ben shook his head and walked away toward a second rowboat about to put out from shore. Farrell stood looking at the water, imagining Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner sliding swiftly along in their kayak, tucked in snugly between the little dark waves. A large seagull followed the rowboat most of the way, swooping low as if to snap up the last herring-bright scatterings of daylight in its wake.

  Chapter 17

  Crof Grant’s death was set down to a heart attack. He had, in fact, a minor history of coronary complaints and had been advised against overexertion. The story made good copy and stayed in Bay Area papers for several days, not so much because of the police investigation, which was unimaginatively thorough, as because Crof Grant’s widow threatened to sue the League for Archaic Pleasures for thirty-five million dollars. According to the press, she blamed the League not only for her husband’s death, but for most of his life as well, from the decline of his professional reputation to his occasional attacks of gout, his increasing lapses of memory, passed-up offers of better jobs elsewhere, and the general decay of their marriage. “We couldn’t go anywhere! Half the time I couldn’t even understand what he was saying, and then suddenly he’s challenging the headwaiter to a duel for being an English sympathizer. The children wouldn’t even come to see us. Those goddamn people turned a perfectly good husband and father into the goddamn Master of Ballantrae.”

  She never got around to filing the lawsuit, but she did hire a private investigator, who took his job seriously. He was visible long after the reporters had disappeared, patiently seeking out and questioning almost every man who had been on Cazador Island during the War of the Witch. His time and energy were completely wasted, in a sense, since the only ones beside Farrell who had actually seen Crof Grant die were presumably back home in the early Middle Ages; but he made people nervous, even so, and there began to be resignations. Too many strange, serious wounds had come home from this particular war; too many men were waking out of too-similar nightmares about fanged flying intestines or trying to talk of the sunset battle, and five faces with no more pity in them than the sunset itself, and always giving up the attempt with the same shrinking, half-imploring shrug. The detective told Crof Grant’s widow that he strongly suspected the presence of drugs in the case. She said she just knew it, and to keep digging after those goddamn people. “Sixty-one years old, as much sense as a rutabaga, and they killed him with their goddamn drugs. It explains everything.”

  The reporters came back for the funeral, since it was attended—at the insistence of Crof Grant’s will—by a large formal delegation from the League, in full costume. Farrell stood with Julie and a couple of Grant’s muttering art department colleagues, watching as the plumes, hennins, capes, kirtles, tabards, gipons, mantuas, roquelaures, and pelerines flashed through the waxy air of the funeral chapel and swept bowing before the coffin. The League gained fourteen new members within the week, more than matching the resignations.

  Farrell also appeared to be the only person to have seen Aiffe on the island during the war. Garth’s men denied categorically
that she had ever led or sorcerously aided them, and two witnesses beside her father swore that she had spent that entire weekend visiting cousins in Cupertino. Farrell told Julie everything that he had seen happen, from Aiffe’s tantric coupling with Nicholas Bonner to Ben’s rage of despair over the death of Egil Eyvindsson, somewhere around the year 880. Julie listened silently until he finished, and then asked, “What are you going to do about it?” She had wept for Crof Grant with a vehemence that surprised Farrell, who had seen no one else do it.

  “Well, I’ll talk to that guy she hired,” he said, “I don’t plan to go looking for him, but when he comes to check me out, I’ll tell him what I know. Fair?” Julie seemed satisfied enough, which pleased Farrell. In a burst of candor, he added, “I really hope he doesn’t show up, but I’ll try to tell him.” He truly meant to keep his word.

  But the investigator did come to find him at work, and in the end Farrell lied to him, like everyone else in the League, by coffee and omission. “Jewel, it wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference. In the first place, he wouldn’t have believed a word of it, any more than the cops—I mean, I could feel that—and in the second place… Listen to me. In the second place, what difference would it make if he did believe me? The guy who killed Grant is eight hundred years out of town, over the border. We don’t have any extradition treaties with the twelfth century.”

  As always when she was really angry, Julie looked as if she were about to laugh. “The person who killed him is watching TV, doing a little babysitting for pocket money, and so delighted she can’t stop hugging herself. She’s getting clean away with murder, and now she knows she can get away with it anytime she wants, because nobody will ever say a word, no matter what they see. You have just personally handed her the whole damn League, from which I have just this minute resigned.” Farrell started to protest, but she said, “Joe, get out of here. I really want you to leave me alone for awhile. I’ll call when I feel like talking to you again. Go on, Joe, now.” He left without looking back, pointedly careful not to slam her front door.

  Furious, bitterly defensive, trying himself on her charges a dozen times a day and acquitting himself each time, with no discernible effect on his sadness, Farrell spent the next two weeks either working, practicing with Basilisk for the Whalemas Tourney—the lute back had been expensively repaired, and everyone told him that it sounded as good as ever, but it didn’t—or shopping and running errands for Sia. Ben was ill for some days after the war—Sia said it was flu—but then went immediately back to the graduate seminar on the Haraldskvaeoi that he had been conducting all summer. He seemed perfectly functional—and completely without spirit, not so much listless as somehow exiled, a squatter in his own body, a refugee enduring one more camp. A student, encountered at Farrell’s thirty-sixth viewing of La Belle Et La Bête, told him that Ben had lately taken to breaking off during readings to stare at his class out of blankly frightened eyes without saying another word for the rest of the period. “Sometimes he makes these sounds. Not crying, just these sounds, in his chest, over and over; I have to leave when he starts doing that. Or he’ll start singing, right in the middle of an argument about word position, these crazy old pieces of Norwegian fishing songs. They’re going to find out about him.”

  Farrell told Sia, who said that she knew and said little else. More even than Ben, she appeared to be slipping into a chilling solitude, neglecting her counseling work, her weaving, her carving, to stump through the house in ponderous silence, attended always by the wistful clicking of Briseis’ claws. Her prowling was not at all aimless; Farrell was entirely certain that she was looking for something real and specific that she needed badly, but he knew well enough that it would not be something he could help her to find. Once he woke knowing that she was standing just beyond the door of the guest bedroom; but when he opened it, he saw her with her back to him, gazing so intently at a blank wall that she did not hear him when he spoke to her. “What is it, what are you looking at? Sia, what can I do?” She answered him without turning, but not in any language he knew. After a while, Farrell went back to bed. He lay awake for the rest of the night and, if she moved at all from that spot, he never heard her.

  She had not become mute or autistic; when she chose, she still spoke in connected sentences on subjects enough to get through most dinners, providing that Farrell cooperated by avoiding any mention of the League for Archaic Pleasures or the War of the Witch. Their meeting with the great goddess Kannon under alien, unbearable stars was also off limits, though she surprised him by asking about Micah Willows, with a faraway flash of her old mischief. “Now I don’t want to find out that he has already rented out Mansa Musa’s room. He is not to be taking in any more boarders, please.”

  “He isn’t,” Farrell assured her, adding without having planned to, “I think he’s likely to be a boarder himself pretty soon. I think Julie’s probably going to have him stay with her for a bit, after he gets out of the hospital.” She had never suggested this to him, but he knew it suddenly to be true.

  The two weeks were a bad time. He was lonely for Julie and as deeply afraid for Ben and Sia as if they were his aging parents. There was no one for him to talk to except Hamid ibn Shanfara. Hamid sympathized, but had his own problems. “Whalemas Tourney coming on like the Concorde, and I am not ready. Usually got the whole war wrapped up tight by now, your basic epic, full of heroic deaths and family trees, suitable for framing, member FDIC. But this war was hard to get a grip on, you might have noticed that.” Farrell nodded. Hamid said, rather gently, “And you better go practice your music. Be a lot of work for us both at the Whalemas Tourney. New king to be crowned, no question about that, and a bunch of squires being made knights, and a whole lot of singing and dancing, and probably a mummers’ play in the evening, you know they’ll be needing musicians for that. We’ll keep ourselves busy and then, after that, we can quit the League.” Farrell was silent for a moment and then nodded again. Hamid said, “It’ll be time.”

  There was a convention of horseless-carriage collectors at the county fairgrounds. Farrell went on a picnic with them, riding in the back of his boss’ 1904 Packard. The participants wore cloth slouch caps, knickers, long dusters, flowered bonnets and picture hats, gauntlets, high-buttoned shoes, and aviator scarves. They were friendly and talkative, as clean as their spidery little machines, and many among them, both old and young, seemed themselves somehow restored, the dirty precipitations of their usual time scoured lovingly away from them. Farrell noticed that they never strayed very far from the cars, but clung to them physically, as if to seats on a sanctified wagon train. He laughed at that to himself; but when the whole caravan set off on their tour of back roads and small towns, the air did begin to taste wilder and younger, and the country almost imperciptibly to seem less certain, less amenable. Farrell saw a deer, a black squirrel, and—in marshy ground, when the cars splashed across a shallow brook—the footprint of a very large cat. In a while, he became aware that he was looking for jet trails and for television antennas above the trees.

  When they arrived at the picnic ground, Briseis was waiting, desperately apologetic but quite firm. Farrell pretended at first not to know her, then took her aside and yelled at her and, as a last resort, tried to seduce her from her duty with deviled eggs and grapes. Briseis wagged and fawned and bounced; and they rode back to Avicenna together in the 1898 Citröen of a cat breeder whose beeper had gone off. On the way, Farrell whispered to Briseis, “This is absolutely the last time you do this to me. How do you think it looks?” He was hoping the cat breeder would not overhear him, but she did.

  The front door of Sia’s house was unlocked. In spite of the summer heat, the rooms downstairs were small with cold, as if no one lived there. Farrell felt a curious headachy pressure on his sinuses; it had begun as soon as he stepped through the door. He went from one room to another, calling for Sia, and then climbed the stairs with Briseis scrambling behind him. He could not even smell Sia in her bedroom, bath, study
or office, and he knew her smell almost as well as he knew Julie’s. He went downstairs again and came back up, checking every room two or three times, knowing how still she could sit and how easily he could pass her by. At last, he turned to Briseis and said aloud, “Okay. This house has places I’ve never seen.” Briseis looked at him as boldly and steadily as she had done once before, on the blue alligator train. Farrell said, “Well, you’re the familiar around here, you show me.” Abruptly Briseis pushed past him and trotted down the hallway that led to the linen closet. It was considerably longer than Farrell remembered when he followed her.

  He had long since come to terms with the fact that he would never truly know how many rooms and windows there were in Sia’s house, nor where certain corridors went now and then. Farrell knew false walls and secret passages when he tapped them; this was a matter, not of hollowness, but of plenitude, of alternatives thriving in the same space at the same time. The fact of this did not frighten him, as long as he only saw it out of the corners of his eyes, but the concept made him giddy, especially in the attic. He called after Briseis, “Hey, we’re not going up to the attic, are we?”

  Briseis did not look back. She led him straight into the linen closet—which stretched away around them like a courtyard, smelling of old rainy stones instead of fresh pillowcases—turned right, or something like it, passed through a windowless room that made her extremely nervous, and started up a stairway. Farrell laughed sharply, because Sia had spoken once of a servants’ stair and he had searched for it, casually at first, then obsessively, as if pursuing some professionally legendary monster, always a slither ahead of him. Must start in the kitchen, behind the pantry someway. No, I looked there, damn it. Damn, that dog is definitely taking me to the attic.