Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

But Julie was pushing past Nicholas Bonner and through the dancers, shaking her head at him as urgently as if his temptation were flashing above him in a bubbly comic-strip thought balloon. Gaping and swaying next to a bemused King Bohemond, Crof Grant hummed Will Ye No‘ Come Back Again ? in his nose. A trickle of sweat fluttered down Farrell’s side, and the Countess Elizabeth Bathory leaned forward a little.

“Come, fair knight,” Aiffe said, “your name.” She hugged her father’s arm, shivering with delight, looking like a puppy grinning around a stick it has no intention of retrieving. She held out her free hand to Farrell, palm up, wriggling the long, rag-nailed fingers.

There were no names in his head. Later that was to disquiet him as much as anything else; that he—junk-man of the lost, curator of the truly useless, random cherisher, keeper, keener—should come to bay without so much as a third string Round Tabler or journeyman superman out of Italian romances at his call. Aiffe widened her strange eyes, attempting or burlesquing seductiveness, and Farrell found that he could not look away from her. The effort made him dizzy and short of breath, almost sick. He felt Nicholas Bonner’s smile trailing across his shoulders, burning where it clung. Aiffe said three soft words that Farrell had never heard before. The sickness moved, spilling thickly through him like some spoiled wisdom that he knew he could not bear. She said the words again, and then a third time, and Farrell began to tell her his name, so she would stop.

Close at hand, a man was singing, or rather declaiming in a high-pitched rhythmic drone that sounded like stones and shells rasping back down a beach with the ebb tide. Farrell had no idea how long the man had been doing this.

Aiffe looked up, and Farrell, released, stumbled a step forward, turned his head and saw Hamid ibn Shanfara. The Saracen’s voice had again played its trick with distance; he was standing alone on a hummock of bare earth near the pavilion, with his shoulders back and his hands tucked into the sash of his white robe. He nodded very slightly to Farrell, touching a forefinger airily to the indigo turban, which was coming loose again.

Farrell laughed, feeling as though his throat were full of old straw. With the laughter came the next lines of the lonesome, gentle, possessed madman’s song. He said to Aiffe, “My geas is still upon me. I may speak my name to no other hearing than yours.”

She lowered her eyes to his again, but no power clenched on him this time, and he could tell that she knew it. She did not move until he whispered mockingly, “Come on, Rosanna, be a sport.” Then she came toward him, and he half expected to see the ground rise in small surges under her feet, as the surface of the mountain lake had done when the storm came pacing across it.

When she was very near, he said the name, holding it out between them like holy water or a kitchen chair. “I am the Knight of Ghosts and Shadows.” Muscles crawled in Aiffe’s temples, as though she were trying to lay her ears flat back; her lips all but disappeared. Farrell bowed to her.

Nicholas Bonner was hugging himself rapturously, bouncing on his tiptoes, mouth wide open, tongue floating and preening between strong bluish-white teeth. Farrell looked down and saw that the clover bracelet on his wrist—Julie’s forgotten favor—had turned brown and crisp and was a breath away from falling to sharp crumbles. It scratched his skin faintly as he raised his arm to study it. From the look of it, he might have been holding it near a fire.

Ben did not come home that night, nor the day and night after. Sia gave three unrelated explanations for his absence. On the third night, Farrell cooked dinner, and they ate in a tightrope silence in which Farrell’s thoughts ticked and clanged and grated as noisily as his Aunt Dolores’ insides had bombilated all through innumerable family gatherings. No one was ever allowed to take the slightest notice, even during a volley over a soldier’s grave or Tournament Night at the bowling alley; which always meant the death of conversation before dessert, spluttering smaller cousins being hustled out of the dining room, and his mother reciting recipes in forlorn counterpoint to Aunt Dolores’ salute to visiting royalty. Now in turn he heard himself chattering helplessly about garlic soup or his work at the zoo, trying to drown out the bowling-alley racket of his mind, while Sia watched him from far across the table, stolid as a sidewalk. She ate and drank whatever he set before her, as if that were her job.

After dinner, she built a fire, hunkering flat-footed to riffle through kindling like a cardsharp, turning the heavy madroña half-logs daintily around each other until they fitted, all but clicking into a perfect snowflake matrix. She snapped a single match at the pile and sat back with a soft little grunt as the flames exploded upward like arterial blood. Without turning, she said, “It is quite possible to die of unasked questions. Why do you never ask me what you want to know?”

Taken off-guard—they had been torpidly discussing the Avicenna City Council’s recent motion to prohibit the local sale of war toys, grain-fed beef, and all dolls without genitals—he replied immediately, “How come you never go out of the house?” He had not realized that he was even aware of it.

“What kind of a question is that?” She sounded mildly surprised and amused. “What makes you think I don’t go out?”

Farrell said, “Your clients come to you. Ben and I do all the shopping. You don’t go anywhere with Ben—not to dinner, not to a party, a movie, a concert, not since I’ve been here. I haven’t once seen you get the mail.”

“But when do you ever see me, Joe? What do you think you see me doing?” Her voice remained oddly playful, almost arch. “All you can be sure of, with your schedule, is that I am someone who eats breakfast, receives strange people at strange hours, and likes to listen to your music in the evenings. For all you know, I might spend my afternoons preaching hell and repentance at a bus stop. I might be working with a gang of shoplifters, confidence tricksters. I might have half a dozen lovers or a paper route. You wouldn’t know.” Farrell laughed grudgingly, and Sia said, “Ask me a real question.”

“Where the hell is Ben?” Sia did not seem to have heard, but continued to squat with her back to him. Farrell said, “Sia, forty-eight hours is just too long for a departmental meeting, but it does make him a missing person. I think we ought to call the cops.”

“No,” she said to the fire. “No, we call no one.” She was hugging herself, rubbing her shoulders as if she could not get warm. A song prickled across Farrell’s mind: Last night I saw the new moon, with the old moon in her arms . He said, “When I saw him in Barton Park, he didn’t recognize me. I didn’t tell you that part.”

“You didn’t have to.” Farrell heard the calmness as condescension and found that he was suddenly, carelessly furious. “Of course I didn’t have to,” he mimicked her. “Nothing ever comes as a surprise to Madame LaZonga. The cosmos is wired to that bay window in the kitchen, the gods check in with you twice a week, your rocking chair is shrouded in eternal veils of goddamn mystery. Me, I really don’t want to know all that stuff, whether the universe runs on premium or unleaded. I’m just a bit anxious about my friend, that’s all.”

She was laughing before he had finished, a rough, generous whoop that set the fire tumbling and giggling itself. Realizing that she was trying to rise, he placed his hand under her elbow, letting her lever herself upright against him. The weight on his arm was so much greater than he had expected that he almost toppled over her, momentarily filled with the terror of drowning. The feeling vanished as soon as she was on her feet, and Sia gave no sign that she had noticed his clumsiness, or his fear.