The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  Absurd old songs and proverbs straggled through Farrell’s head as he watched her. He chanted, “Oh, what a time I had with Aiffe the mermaid, down at the bottom of the sea,” and announced earnestly to Ben, “What that is, that’s Neptune’s park, ribbed and paled in with rocks unscalable and roaring waters.” Ben looked at him with Egil Eyvindsson’s face.

  Ben whispered, “Oh, God, she never could resist going back to stone.”

  For all the racket of their fall, the stone fragments had not raised even a handful of foam or caused the tiniest eddy. Now, however, as Aiffe splashed and sported in overwhelming triumph, a deep, slow swirl began to move in the pool, far below her joyously kicking feet, turning the water deep green, then red, then orange, spreading steadily, picking up speed until the entire grotto hummed and sang and thrilled to a yawning note that the three watching could only feel in their teeth and bones. Aiffe understood too late; she clung to a rock and screamed unbearably for control, but the waterspout swept her aside as it surged to full height, spinning so fast now that the immense wind of it tore white holes in the mad sky and hurled Aiffe completely out of the pool. At the top of the spout Sia danced on one foot, whirling against the cyclone’s rotation, her arms bent sharply across her breasts and face. Farrell knew that she was singing again, though he could not hear her.

  Naked, dripping, half-stunned, Aiffe was already up on her hands and knees, doggedly crawling in a circle, counterclockwise, muttering like a bag lady and scratching blurry marks wherever she found a patch of soft earth. She did not turn when the high, leathery fins and great rough backs began to break the pool’s surface. Nor did she move even when the rippling necks with scales as big as bricks lifted jaws that turned themselves almost inside-out trying to snatch Sia down. Only when the waterspout caught fire, blazing up with the breathy hiss of newspaper did she stand and look, gradually raising both fists to hail the impossible castle of flame that hid Sia from her once more.

  Her cry was wearily implacable. “On your way, old bitch! I told you I’d never let you rest anywhere! On your way, just keep moving!”

  At the sound of her voice, the waterspout billowed out into something momentarily like a human shape traced in fireworks—all sparkling hips and Catherine-wheel belly—before toppling silently in on itself and vanishing, taking the fire with it. Only the wind remained, and it was a different wind altogether, alluringly mischievous as Sia’s eyes, playful as Briseis with her trusted beach towel. Like Briseis, in fact, this wind had a toy of its own, one last living ember, no bigger than a penny at that height, but caressed and cozened by the breeze into a tiny nova, soaring over the shattered grotto. Tossed up, carelessly dropped, captured again, it grew brighter and brighter, the brilliance of its little life almost as painful to look at as Aiffe’s cries of rage had been to hear.

  Far below, Aiffe stood very quietly now, watching the dancing spark for a long time before she began to dance again, very slowly, her movements strangely clumsy, slurred with menace. She kept turning her head far back over her right shoulder as she danced, snapping her jaws.

  Farrell had in his life seen more shape-changing than most people. Each time he handled the experience less well; it always left him feeling as wrenched and disoriented as if he were the one who had passed through the sweet, nauseating shudder in the molecules, to stumble into moonlight on four feet. He looked away, as always, when it happened with Aiffe, but not quickly enough. Her shoulders hunched and bulked, neck and legs shortening so quickly that she seemed to fall to her knees. The metamorphosis of her head was frightening enough—the bones visibly hollowing and streamlining, but the face itself plunging forward, not into a raptor’s hooked beak, but becoming a kind of feathered muzzle, drooling through gray lips. The arms were the worst. They jolted up and out in electrical spasms, achieving magical angles, and Farrell heard them grinding in their sockets as they yanked Aiffe off the ground, even before rust-and-lichen-colored feathers had fully formed. Her feet had turned to huge, yellow-gray talons, arthritically gnarled by their own massiveness. Even the scales on them looked like miniature claws.

  Farrell heard Ben laugh and almost failed to recognize the sound. The Aiffe-bird gained altitude like a helicopter, but the very power of its approach blew its bright prey constantly out of reach as it tried to close in. No swallow could have veered and cornered more neatly in pursuit of a gnat, but the ember drifted on, fanned to near-white heat now by furious wingbeats just behind it. The great claws clutched futilely; the slobbering mouth snapped and snapped; and on the ground, Ben whispered, almost pityingly, “Fool.”

  At the same instant, Julie gripped Farrell’s wrist and said, “Look down.”

  Farrell realized that, while they had all been gaping after the Aiffe-bird, the grotto and its surroundings had become a northern European forest, anciently dark with huge oaks, elms, ash trees, and maples, stretching almost as far as Farrell could see, to a snowy void that he looked at once, and then never again. There is no horizon. There is only where she lets go.

  A little way from where he stood with Ben and Julie, an archer in red crouched under an elm tree, setting an arrow to his bowstring. When he rose, Farrell saw that his face was all of the same white nothingness, except for two pulsing amber absences that were his eyes. The Aiffe-bird tried to dodge the arrow, but it danced after her, tracking her frantic doublings and stooping wherever she fled, until there was nothing for her but to change shape in midair. The arrow flashed between her human neck and shoulder as she fell.

  Julie made a little splintering sound in her throat; Ben shouted “Sia!” as if it were no name, but a blessing to armies; and Farrell, being who he was, heard himself deliriously singing snatches of a very old ballad about a king who learned to fly:

  “And he flew as high as the steeple top,

  And the sun shone gold on his golden crown,

  And he flew as high as any hawk,

  Till his own huntsmen shot him down.“

  Aiffe tumbled, sprawling and flailing for a moment, before she righted herself and spoke sharply to the earth below her. The tearing branches leaned aside to let her light nakedness hurtle past, and the ground bulged and rippled up in whipped-cream solicitude, to gather her tenderly into a forgiving green lap, the breath not even jarred out of her. The ember followed her down, fluttering in a rather bored way, and vanished like a snowflake before ever reaching the ground.

  Aiffe was on her feet instantly, with the spring of a boxer determined to show that it was a slip and not a knockdown. But the gesture clearly ate up the last of that wild energy that had, in one afternoon, created illusory beings and real storms, hurled thunderbolts, torn rocks and trees to pieces, and broken into a goddess’ sky, where Aiffe had flown as high as any hawk. Now she trudged through stillborn spells on stumbling feet, reduced to picking up handfuls of dirt and hurling them into the air, kicking stones and sand away on all sides. Behind her, Sia materialized slowly—lazily—out of the little showers of earth, the way she arrived out of blood and black stone long ago. She was dancing as she took shape, but it was a different dance this time, and she was different.

  “No more,” she said inside Farrell, and with those words the great forest fled, and they were back in the vaguely pleasant little room that Farrell remembered, with the windows full of nothing but Avicenna twilight and an old man and woman laughing on a street corner. Sia was sitting calmly in her elusive chair facing Aiffe, who stared back at her from the middle of the room, dazedly plucking at the velvet gown which had been restored to her. Farrell, Ben, and Julie clung together by the dusty bookcases, while, in the furthest corner, Briseis kept tremulous watch over Nicholas Bonner. He was standing utterly still, arms at his sides, looking only at Sia. A terrible pity swept through Farrell then, and for once he could not turn his eyes away. What could he be but what he is, nothing but skin and spirit stretched unbearably over a black hole? What could he be but what she made when she was young?

  “No more,” Sia said again. Even si
tting, she was still dancing, moving only her feet in languid patterns like an alchemist’s equations, as Aiffe moved more and more slowly. Sia’s hands opened to show that she was holding some of the sandy earth Aiffe had thrown aside—powdery bluewhite crystals in her right hand, red-gold in the other. She raised her hands and began to let the crystals drift to the ground. Aiffe screamed, the sound made horrifying by the immobility of her face. Julie started toward her, but Ben barred the way.

  Sia smiled. Abruptly she tossed the golden crystals straight up, catching them in her left hand while the bluewhite stones were settling gently into her right. She seemed to be playing casually with the crystals, not juggling them, but allowing them to leap randomly from her hands like dolphins or flames, as they chose. Each time this happened, Aiffe half swayed, half lurched a few steps toward her, and then froze again as if the two were playing some sidewalk game together. Sia was singing once more, and this time Farrell understood every one of the dreadfully gentle words.

  “Proud sister, nothing you believed is true,

  Proud sister, everything you know has betrayed you,

  Head and heart, there is nothing to you but shadow,

  nothing but shadow,

  you have no friend but shadow,

  Sister, little sister, the shadows wait to enjoy you,

  go to them,

  go to them,

  go to them…“

  With every repetition, the crystals whirled upward, melting together for an emerald instant, just at the height of Aiffe’s eyes, then cascading back into order as unlikely as waterspouts catching fire, not one pebble dropped or in the wrong hand. They were spinning steadily faster, and Farrell took a long time to isolate the further moment when they vanished altogether, returning almost too quickly for their total absence to register. Even when he made himself realize that the crystals were dancing through Aiffe’s head on their way from one hand to the other, even then he would never have believed what he saw, except for the expression in her eyes, which were all she could move now. Sia sang:

  “Your power is shadow, but a shadow of mercy

  would have saved you,

  Your knowledge is all shadow,

  but a shadow of understanding

  would have saved you,

  Your pride is the pride of a shadow, my sister,

  But a shadow’s shadow of respect for the gods

  would have saved you,

  would have saved you,

  would have saved you,

  from the shadows…”

  The crystals flared brighter after each tiny, impossible disappearance, and each time Aiffe had dwindled that much more, as if the shining flecks were draining all her substance, emptying her of light and color and will. She was making a sound, nevertheless, a wordless, insect whine that could only have been produced by an adolescent faced with an unimpressed universe. The crystals had begun to form pictures as they flashed back and forth: flickering but distinct visions of horses and beaches, armored men clashing by torchlight—no, those are headlights, they’re fighting under a damn freeway—boxes of breakfast cereal, boxes splitting at the corners with mysterious hand-labeled jars and packets; buses and television commercials; and a loose-leaf school notebook, filled with magical symbols and diagrams drawn in multicolored felt-tip ink. The patterns looked exactly like Aiffe’s dances.

  It’s all her life, it’s Rosanna Berry’s life burning out there, moment by moment. It’s burning, it’s all burning. He understood as well as he was ever to understand anything again that every image the crystals shaped was entirely real, ripped whole out of Aiffe’s mind—that’s Nicholas Bonner, I guess that’s her mother, that looks like a kid’s drawing of trees and maybe a dog—and that the pictures’ glow was literally the light of actual moments being forever consumed. The way they used to disembowel somebody and throw his guts in the fire right in front of him. To burn a life all up like that. A scene of naked people coupling and tripling in a field under a horned moon hissed and vanished, to be replaced by Garth de Montfaucon reading aloud from a Dr. Seuss book. Aiffe kept up that whine that made Farrell want to shake her. He said loudly, “Don’t. Don’t, Sia, don’t.”

  He never knew whether he had truly broken Sia’s concentration, bent so absolutely on Aiffe that, in a way, nothing but Aiffe seemed real, nor did he ever allow himself the illusion of having affected Aiffe’s fate one way or the other. But the wheeling crystals did falter for a moment, Sia did turn slightly toward him, and in that moment Nicholas Bonner made the only move left to him. Knocking Briseis aside, he sprang forward in a bound that covered half the room—the laughing golden frog squatting in the redwood grove that first night—shrieking, “Now, sweet witch, now, save me as I save you, now, now!” and batting madly at the tiny lights swarming around Aiffe’s head. Several of the wild blows struck Aiffe herself as she staggered sideways, but it was Sia who cried out.

  The crystals blazed up so brightly that even Sia took a step backward. Farrell kept his eyes as wide open as he could, although he saw the world in aching, molten shadows for days afterward. The colors ran and flooded together in a motley bubble shimmering around Nicholas Bonner. Farrell could not hear his scream, but he felt it, like a saw going through the bone. Nicholas Bonner pounded his fists against turquoise, cold, smoky crimson, and great blowing drifts of amber, but he might have been another silent image, burning to ashes with the rest of Aiffe’s memory. The bubble tightened around him, and he fell, started to get up, then abruptly tumbled over, curling into a fetal position, knees drawn hard to his chest, head tucked between folded hands, lightning-colored eyes wide as a dead man’s. The slack lips were saying a single word, mother, over and over.

  Sia dawned out of her chair. There was no movement involved, nothing to do with breath and muscle and leverage, only that slow, immense arising in freedom from everything mortal. Farrell tried to look straight at her, to see her truly, but a monster would have been more comprehensible, a black stone more human. What went to answer her son’s despair was a shape that Farrell’s senses could not contain and a light that his spirit simply could not bear. This is why you’re not ever supposed to see the gods naked. So he looked at Julie and Ben instead, and Julie looked back at him, but Ben was far away, moving toward the light.

  It took Sia forever to reach the crystal bubble, but forever was no time at all. However long her journey really lasted, she was there while Farrell’s ill-used and completely mutinous eyes were still reporting to him that she was crossing the room, was stretching out her arms, and was beginning to say a word that he knew must be Nicholas Bonner’s real name. The bubble waited for her, matching her light with its own; but behind the slippery flames, it had already grown thick-walled and opaque, almost hiding Nicholas Bonner. Sia took hold of it.

  Rather, she took hold in it, for her hands passed straight through the crystal fires and disappeared within the bubble—how far is she, how far has she gone in there, which is she, which is she? For an instant, Sia and the bubble were one—a single blinding silence like a star, endlessly devouring itself. Ben was as close to it as his body would let him go, shouting in a language that Farrell had never heard. Farrell had a moment’s glimpse of Aiffe with her head thrown back and her skinny arms waving randomly. He was never quite certain whether she had been merely fighting for balance, trying to knit one last reflexive spell together while Sia was unmindful of her, or something somewhere between the two. Julie pinioned her and held her firmly, taking no chances.

  Then Sia was there again in the form they knew, her hands empty, her mouth opening to utter a howl of hopeless pain that would surely rattle the real stars in their courses and shake gods down out of the heavens like scurrying cockroaches. But the cry never came, and Farrell could not breathe for the dreadful wrongness of that denial. The bubble disappeared. Unlike every other picture that the crystals had made, this one was not followed by any other bright vision. It was just gone, and a very old woman was sinking almost weightlessly to a floor n
o more solid than herself, and the windows were now saying that it was earlier than it had been, not yet dusk at all.

  Ben picked Sia up and carried her back to her chair, which altered its shape to keep her from falling again. He was still speaking to her in the strange language that sounded like a storm trying hard to be gentle. Sia’s eyes were closed, but her chuckle was as tenderly malicious as always. She said, “For what it is worth, my dearest Ben, my best Ben, you are the only human who ever learned even that much of my talk. Speak it to yourself sometimes, just to remember me.” Ben put her fingers to his mouth and whispered against them.

  Farrell asked, “What happened to Nicholas Bonner? After what he tried to do, after everything, you were fighting that bubble, those crystals for him.”

  Still with her eyes closed, she said, “The crystals of time. I did a foolish thing. I meant to punish that girl in the way that we punish, that we have to punish such pride. I meant to strip her of every memory except that she had offended the gods and must do penance forever.” When she looked at Farrell, he saw the huge stone woman with the dog’s head once again, and she smiled, nodding slightly. “But time is not mine to control,” she said, “only to tease a little. Time is everyone’s enemy, especially of the gods. My son got in time’s way, that is all, like any child running into the street after a ball. No more to it than that, really.”

  “But you went after him,” Farrell persisted. “You tried to bring him back, you got in the way too.”