The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  Julie was soaked, dazed, and furious, but unharmed, swearing in Japanese, as Farrell had never heard her do, while Ben and he carried her back to the bus and dried everyone off with bedrolls and oil rags. “Black ice,” she kept snarling, “black ice in fucking September, and both forks bent to hell. Okay, now the bitch dies.” There was no talk of salvaging the motorcycle; they left it to bleach in the desert and lunged along, while hailstones the size of gumballs flayed the remaining paint off Madame Schumann-Heink. Two side windows blew out, but the windshield held, though Farrell worried more about the engine vibrations as he felt them through the frame. He had driven the ancient VW by the seat of his pants for too long not to know when his seat felt wrong.

  The back road followed the eastern frontier of the university, flirted momentarily with a freeway, considered a serious career as a link between Avicenna and the incorporated shopping malls beyond the hills, then shrugged and looped down toward drowsily flowering Scotia Street. The hail was slacking off, but the wind still came clawing out of a sky the color of phlegm. Ben said heavily, “I thought maybe she wouldn’t be watching for us on this road. I’ve never seen her do anything with weather, I didn’t think.” The last words trailed away into hopeless exhaustion, and Julie took his hands between her own.

  There was an explosion behind them, and then another, and Farrell said, “She’s good with engines, too. We just blew two pistons.” He cut the motor, sighed very deeply, and let Madame Schumann-Heink drift the last three blocks to Sia’s house, braking to a stop at the ragged rosemary hedge and the redwood flags leading like invading footprints straight to the place where the front door had been. The carving that Sia had been working on that morning was propped on the back of the living-room sofa. Farrell sat at the curb and looked at it through the hole in the house.

  Chapter 19

  Farrell never knew why he brought the lute with him; he was not even aware of it until the three of them were creeping up the stairs. Except for the door, nothing was obviously missing or damaged, but every room seemed shrunken, smelling palely of damp dust, as a house smells that has stood closed for years. Farrell heard no sounds beyond the scrape of their shoes and the soft thump of the lute on his shoulder, and even those were strangely smothered, as if there were no air to bear them up. Everything is in that room with her, everything—not just her son and his witch, but all the light and soul and energy there ever was in this house. We can’t really see the rest of it, because it doesn’t quite exist without her attention. And all her attention is far away now, in a little low-rent place that I probably can’t find again. East of the sun, west of the moon, with an unlisted phone number.

  He had counted on Briseis leading them to Sia, as she had done before, but the dog was as gone as the front door. So, for that matter, was the linen closet, leaving no least suggestion that it had ever been there. This time it was Farrell’s turn to rage helplessly; but Ben said, “There are so many ways,” and took them downstairs again, around the back of the house, in through one of the uncountable windows, and up an evasive stair which dissolved into a dim flurry of passages fading off in every direction. Farrell and Julie filed after him along corridors they could not see, around certain doubtful corners that had to be caught up with before they could be turned, and through high, transparent outlines, the color of abandoned spiderwebs, cold to make the blood ache. I know what these are—the ghosts of rooms she forgot about, just let go when she didn’t need to imagine them anymore. Within those almost-walls, his sense of balance abandoned him utterly, leaving him nauseous and heartsick, holding onto Julie. How terrible to be forgotten by the god that made you, even if you’re just a room. How could you love something that can do that anytime?

  In the end, he sometimes thought, they never did find that last room at the top of the house. It found them. The open doorway seemed to come roaring up to them, visibly slowing down and stopping where they stood. No country hotel parlor waited beyond, but fat, lumbering vines, crowding the frame, beckoning and warning with the same green greed. They had to put their heads down and plow blindly onward, tearing the vines aside and trampling flowers like unpleasant human faces underfoot, until they broke out into a clearing that had nothing in it but sandy earth and stones and Aiffe dancing. Farrell never found another word for what she was doing, but he always knew there was one.

  Her movements were nothing like the way she had danced with him or like any galliard or almaine he had ever seen her perform at the League’s affairs. On that ground, she was all swirling, filigreed insult; here, dancing alone, she was almost two-dimensional, rigid and thin as a razor blade. Back and forth she went, keeping to a small space, always traveling in a straight line, each razor-quick turn and glide at right angles to the one before, her body gradually writing a precise shape into the air, as if on a darkly gleaming floor inlaid with fiery stars and pentagrams. If she sensed her watchers’ presence—and Farrell thought she did—she paid no heed at all, but only danced.

  No one, including Aiffe, saw Sia appear. Suddenly there was never a moment when she had not been there, trudging forever across the clearing toward the girl who was calling her out of hiding. She was wearing the disquietingly fluid garment that Farrell remembered, but it murmured over a body that he did not know, one grown impossibly stooped and withered since just that morning. Her shoulders all but hid her emaciated chest. Under the gown, her belly and thighs seemed to have run like candle wax into pitiful drizzles of skin. The gray eyes had gone suet-colored in her shrunken face, and when she mumbled to herself as she slumped along, Farrell saw that her teeth were rotting like cheese. Turning, he saw the silent tears sliding down Julie’s face and realized that he was crying, too.

  Aiffe’s dance never faltered, nor did she speak a word to the wretched old woman standing before her. It was Nicholas Bonner’s angelic laughter that caressed her as he strolled out of the wet, jungly air. Where are we now, really? In what ghost-garden of her dreams? “Has it all caught up with you at once, great mother? What, all that majesty tumbled downstairs, all that thunder and lightning shriveled to a sneeze? Did such serene wisdom ever foresee that it must come to this?” He stood beside Aiffe, hands on hips—a child in tights with a Halloween face and a voice that was casting off its assumed humanity, like a tiger bursting from cover. Even his language was melting into a barely comprehensible croon of tiger joy. “How beautiful, how beautiful you are now, what a wonder to see you so. My treasure, my heart, my prize, my mother, how beautiful you are.” He reached out a hand to tilt Sia’s ruined face toward him; but at the last moment, he drew it back.

  Aiffe had begun to move slowly around Sia, not in circles, but in hexagons, octagons, dodecahedrons, weaving straightline patterns that glazed the air, dimming Sia to Farrell’s sight. Nicholas Bonner sang, “But now you must go where I will never go again, to lie down howling in that place you made, that place where you have sent me time and time, and you must wait for someone to call you back to light and warmth and pity, and no one ever will, not you, never. And this is nothing but the least bare justice of the gods, and you know that better than anyone except your son.” The old woman shuffled from foot to foot, never looking at him.

  “Oh, mother, goodbye,” Nicholas Bonner said. Aiffe danced through one last binding figure and raised her arms in a way that Farrell had never imagined. At his side, Ben sprang up and charged, screaming. A vine caught him at the shins, dropping him flat on his face. Nicholas Bonner turned toward the commotion, his laughter soaring as Aiffe’s arms came down.

  But from the far side of the clearing, in two gigantic bounds and a desperate, yelping leap, Briseis came skidding through the air like a tailless kite in a downdraft. All four legs extended, she crashed full tilt into Nicholas Bonner, who went down harder than Ben and lay where he fell. The stone under his head had not been there a second before. Briseis, half-stunned herself, wandered groggily away into the overgrowth, limping and farting. Aiffe hesitated only an instant in completing her banishing ges
ture, but Farrell missed it because he was hiding his face against Julie’s wet cheek. He kept it there until Sia’s own laughter began.

  He would have known that sound anywhere, in whatever throat. Young and rough, and as much of the earth as Nicholas Bonner’s laugh was of that part of the universe where the stars end, it shook the green vines like a wild wind and set birds fluttering and calling where there had been no hint of any other life in the clearing. Sia said, “The justice of the gods. As old as he is, and he still believes that.” Farrell thought he heard Briseis whine, but it was Aiffe.

  When he opened his eyes and turned, he saw that she and Sia were standing so close together that they almost touched, and that the air around them was clear again. Aiffe was plainly trying to back away, and just as obviously could not, for the old woman was chuckling gently, “No, no, child, it was your magic that bound me to you. A very pretty spell, beautiful even, but you let yourself be distracted. Magic is easily offended.” As Farrell, Julie, and a bloody-nosed Ben stared, her body began to grow round and solid once more, her eyes to focus, her skin to restore itself. She explained placidly to Aiffe, “You see, you would never have let me so near to you if I looked even a little bit threatening. And I am only really good at very close range these days. I think I must need contact lenses.”

  Farrell realized that she was dancing too, that all her apparently aimless shuffling was taking her in a little sly circle with Aiffe at the center. Aiffe, shaking off her moment of shocked paralysis, glanced once at Nicholas Bonner, who stirred slightly. She said two words in a sweet, curious tongue, made one ugly gesture with three fingers twisted together, and stepped easily away from Sia, pointing derisively at her. “Pathetic,” she said. “You think you’re such hot shit, but you’re just so pathetic. I don’t need anybody to help me with you.”

  For a few moments they circled each other, Aiffe moving in swift, taunting dashes, almost skipping, while Sia swept around her with liquid economy, appearing to partner rather than challenge her. Aiffe kept up a constant picket-fence rattle of mockery, saying, “Old, old, old. You aren’t immortal, you’re just real, real old, there’s a difference.” Sia laughed and nodded appreciatively and said nothing.

  Julie whispered, “But she’s just standing still. She hasn’t been moving at all.” Farrell blinked, craned his neck absurdly and understood, as suddenly as Aiffe, that nothing of Sia was dancing except her eyes and one foot. The eyes were leading Aiffe, keeping her in motion, forcing her to match her steps to steps that were never really taken. How does she do that? What the hell are we seeing? Aiffe was shaking her head weakly, knowing what was happening to her and trying to break free of it. Sia began to sing.

  There were no words to the song, and her lips did not open; yet Farrell found himself humming it with her, although he had never heard it before. It was not like the song she had sung to Ben, but it filled him with the same childhood longings, wordless themselves. Sia’s sandaled right foot was swinging idly back and forth, the posture and her big single braid making her look like a bored schoolgirl. Aiffe stood still. Her head bobbed slightly in rhythm with the foot’s pendulous motion, as did the heads of Julie, Ben, and Farrell, equally hypnotized. The bare, pebbly spot where the sandal brushed the ground was peeling back, was dissolving into mud, into smoky mud, and then into the white-gold madness of lava, as wrong as the idea of looking down at one’s own flayed ribs or bubbling lung. Sia went on singing quietly. The raw, roiling wound under her pawing foot grew wider, spreading between Aiffe and her with increasing speed. Farrell could smell it now, like impossibly overheated brakes.

  Slow, sleepwalking, teeth bared to the gums, Aiffe raised one hand as high as she could, until it began to spill over with blue light. She gave a rasping, plaintive cry, which was the last thing Farrell heard clearly for some moments. The blue light leaped from her hand and exploded, turning everything in the world to the color of lava. Farrell’s vision returned before his hearing, showing him Ben and Julie sprawled on the ground. Aiffe herself was down on one knee, rubbing her eyes.

  Sia was standing by her, offering her own hand, saying—once the words swam together in Farrell’s head—“Now, that is a long-distance weapon, the oldest of them all. Did my son teach you to use a thunderbolt close to? You should not take him quite so seriously, my dear—there are some holes in his understanding.” She turned away, thoughtfully studying the place where the ground had healed completely, the few tufts of grass not even singed. “But you do well, truly. You should never be ashamed.”

  She kept on turning where she stood, dancing for herself, reaching up to loosen her hair, as she had done when she tried to help Micah Willows. The coarse, grizzled hair fell down differently this time—endlessly lengthening, enveloping her body in a sparkling haze, within which she turned and turned, spinning a chrysalis of light. The thick body seemed to be elongating with her hair, hips lilting languidly, stumpy legs visibly growing slender and graceful.

  Aiffe danced zigzags, arrows, patterns like a shattered mirror. Her straight lines probed for a way into Sia’s glowing spiral, now beginning to move off slowly toward a rise of ground just beyond the clearing. The sandy earth buckled and flowed under them; trees toppled soundlessly; and the rise became a little hill, with one of the fallen trees replaced carefully on the crest. Wonder why she changed it from rosewood to a willow. Maybe that’s her idea of repotting.

  “Mean old, ugly old bitch,” Aiffe said, and hurled what Farrell thought was another thunderbolt after Sia. But this handful of brightness boiled over in midair, condensed and coalesced and was a striped snake the size of a pool cue, its skull bursting almost out of its skin with eagerness to strike. It vanished into Sia’s hair and was never seen again.

  Sia glided on, still spinning her changes, while Aiffe danced around and ahead of her to lean impudently against the willow tree, arms folded. “Just to save you some time, I am really fantastic with trees. I’m just trying to be fair.” Sia passed by her, slipping straight into the willow like sunlight. Aiffe made a silly grab for her and drew back, crying out softly in pain, as the rough bark began to shine and tremble. Even from that distance, Farrell could watch Sia’s presence moving in the willow, could mark her progress from root to crown, along every waking bough to the tip of each long, trailing leaf, as the tree drank her up greedily. Damn thing even looks like her now. It is her.

  Aiffe said loudly, “I warned you,” but Farrell noticed that she stole another quick look back at Nicholas Bonner, who was trying to sit up. “Merry Christmas to me,” she said and abruptly reached inside the velvet gown to put her hand momentarily between her legs. She spoke several words, inaudible to Farrell, then pushed back the gown’s sleeves, rubbed her hands together, placed one carefully on either side of the willow tree, and tore it apart. It groaned and squealed and shredded in her grip, flailing its branches uselessly. Aiffe cracked it like a marrowbone, gutted it with her long, skinny fingers, going through it like a bear through a garbage can.

  Farrell held onto Ben and said, “Wait. We aren’t even here. Wait, Ben.”

  Within minutes—are there there minutes anymore?—the hillside looked more like a beach at low tide, strewn with a raging scatter of branches, bark stripped away in damp, splintery sheets, and shapeless chunks of wood, none bigger than fireplace logs. Aiffe’s spell-given strength had clearly consumed itself. She leaned on the ripped stump of the willow, her splitting velvet gown heavy with sweat, her breath making the same sounds as the murdered tree. When Sia flowered, chuckling, out of a hamburger-sized chip of bark behind her, Aiffe did not turn.

  “Child, enough, let it alone.” Sia’s voice was infuriatingly kind and amused, even to Farrell’s hearing. “We have no quarrel, you and I—how can we? You are a witch, a magical technician, and very good you are, too. But what I am has no more to do with magic than eating ice cream or striking a match. What I am does not die, cannot hate or ever be trusted, and cannot be concerned with your skills. My quarrel is with my son, who use
s you as a stick to beat me with. When you break, he will throw you away. Let it alone and I will be your friend, as much as an immortal can be anyone’s friend. Let me alone.”

  Aiffe had wheeled on Sia before her own breathing was quite under control, so her words burst from her in a wetmouthed splutter of furious contempt. “Immortal? You still think you’re immortal? You fat bitch, you fat old walrus, you’re dead now, I’m standing here watching you rot.” She was slobbering uncontrollably, spitting in Sia’s face. “You want to know who’s immortal? I walked into your house and I found your secret place and I walked right in there, and nobody ever did that to you before, put that up your snotty, fat ass. Oh, you’re gone, you are gone, I’m not going to let you stay anywhere. Nick told me, he showed me how I could take your immortality anytime I got ready. I may be a mere fucking technician, but I’m ready, and you are just gone.”

  Sia never flinched from the blasphemous shower; rather, she put her head back and spun on her toes, like a child playing under an open fire hydrant. Aiffe’s saliva became a rainbow mist of jasmine-scented water arching between Sia and herself, even after she covered her mouth with both hands. The mist thickened, hiding Sia completely, caressing and blurring the ruins of the willow tree. Flapping her arms as if she were shooing birds, Aiffe ran straight into it. Her efforts dispersed the haze quickly enough, but Sia and the willow were both indeed gone. Aiffe screamed so loudly that the entire hillside caved in.

  Farrell found himself lurching forward, at once leaning on Julie and holding Ben back. The imaginary place where they were went mad around them; the sky was gibbering colors, howling the spectrum; the landscape pulsed from jungle to desert to cow pasture with every shudder of color. There is still the room where we made love, this is where her eyes live. Where the littered hill had been, a deep grotto began to take shape, a pool as bright as a cheap toy winking at its heart. Without hesitation, Aiffe scrambled to the edge, threw off her velvet gown, and leaped in. She swam with an otter’s theatrical suppleness, constantly doubling on herself to dive again and again, hunting Sia in every least concealing shadow.