Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

Farrell helped her, though she did not want him to. Far too weary to command him, she ended by letting him bear most of Ben’s weight as they coaxed him up the stairs, to the shoulder-pounding accompaniment of sonorous skaldic jingles. Farrell got the ruined Viking garments off, took them back down to the washing machine, stayed to set the living room to rights, and returned to find Sia sponging Ben’s muddy bruises and brushing shreds of redwood bark out of his stiff hair. Ben had toppled into a turbulent doze, still mumbling rhythmically, his eyes slightly open. Sia was making a sound, too, so softly that Farrell felt it, rather than hearing it, in his eyelids and the roots of his hair. I’ve never been this close to their bed .

“I was there when she called him,” he said. “Aiffe, Rosanna, she called him right out of the air.” Sia glanced at him briefly and went on bathing Ben. Farrell said, “The way you knew each other—I don’t understand it, but I’m not going to forget it. I don’t want to forget it.”

Sia said, “Your lute has fallen on the floor in your room. You should go and see if there is damage.” Her blunt, freckled fingers moved over Ben’s body like cloud shadows.

“Fuck the lute. Is he all right?” The resonant idiocy of the question made him flinch and brace for mockery, but she was almost smiling when she looked at him again.

She said, “No. Nobody is going to be all right. But coffee would be good, anyway.”

The lute was unharmed, though two strings had snapped. After bringing her the coffee, he sat on his bed replacing them, listening to Sia singing to Ben in their room on the other side of the house. She sang more clearly now that he was gone, and he could tell that the words were neither in English nor in the wind-language. The melody was bony and elusive, too alien to be ingratiating, but Farrell listened until it began to dissolve into him, note by note, like bubbles of nitrogen in a diver’s bloodstream. He fell asleep wanting to learn to play it on the lute, but he never could.

Gone before I ever got up,” Farrell said. “First thing I did, I didn’t even get dressed, I went to check on him, and he was long gone. She said he ate breakfast, squashed a few snails in the garden, and off to campus. Another typical day down on the bread-and-jelly farm.”

“What else did she say?” Julie was seated at her drawing table, working intently over a rendering of a diseased retina. When Farrell did not answer, she looked up and waved a bamboo pen for his attention. “What did you say to her, for God’s sake? I refuse to believe you just split the paper and talked about the awful stuff on TV.”

“She doesn’t have a TV.” Farrell had been watering Julie’s houseplants, overdoing it as usual; now he leaned in the workroom doorway, pretending to examine a hanging spider fern. “I asked her things, Jewel. I really pushed. I asked her how she could possibly let him go back to work, as messed up as he was, and what the hell is it anyway with him and this Egil Eyvindsson persona of his? And she looked at me and said, how about some nice orange juice, and I said, right, how about Nicholas Bonner, where did you and that little sweetheart go to school together? And she poured the orange juice, and that’s the way it went. That big jade plant’s dying, by the way.”

“No, it’s just sulking. I moved it from the bedroom, and it hasn’t forgiven me yet.” She turned back to the drawing, shaking her head irritably as she studied it, but still speaking directly to him. “It sounds as if you’d switched roles overnight, doesn’t it? Now you’re the one asking impertinent questions, and she’s being not there. Very odd.”

“She doesn’t look good,” Farrell said. “Whatever truly went on between her and Aiffe and Baby New Year, it took something scary out of her.” He rubbed the side of his knee, which was blue-green and swollen. “At that, she looked a whole lot better than the girl. That’s the one I felt sorry for; I couldn’t help it.” Julie’s head came up swiftly, the dark eyes suddenly disquieted, wind-ruffled water. “Well, I did,” he said. “She was like a kid at her first grown-up party, she was so sure she was in control, part of everything, the big time at last. Poor little twit, she didn’t even know what to wear.”

Julie said, “Never feel sorry for her.” Her voice was tight and sharp, but it broke upward on the word sorry . She asked very quietly, “And you? Do you have any idea what did go on there last night? What games did they play at the party, Joe?‘’

Farrell looked back at her for what felt to him like a long time. Then he put his hands in his pockets and wandered to the window behind the drawing table, where he rested his forehead against the dusty, sunset-warm glass and watched Mushy the white cat trudging after starlings in Julie’s tiny back yard. “I lived with a werewolf once,” he said slowly. “Did I ever tell you about her?” Julie raised her left eyebrow slightly and curled her upper lip on the same side. Farrell said, “In New York. It isn’t so much that she was a werewolf. What she mostly was, was nice, Jewish, very unhappy, and with a mother. She said, I remember, she said once being a werewolf was actually a lot less trouble than her goddamn allergies. It wasn’t, of course. She was just saying that.”

“I’m sure there’s a reason for your telling me all this,” Julie said. “Fairly sure.”

“Just that I don’t have any particular trouble with the supernatural. It bewilders me about as much as the natural, I can’t always tell them apart.” He turned from the window to watch her playing with the bamboo pen as she listened, the long, supple fingers gripping the shaft so strongly that it skidded and twisted like a desperate fish in her hand. He said, “Okay, Point A. The girl, Aiffe, she’s a witch. A real one—maybe not major league yet, but working on it. Working very hard. How’s that so far?”

“Go on.” Julie put the pen down carefully, swung her chair to face him, and began clicking her thumbnails against each other. Farrell said, “Lord, I bet she clowns around a lot in school, drives the home room teacher crazy. Point B. Seems she’s been trying to summon up demons, three times anyway. I don’t know what happened on the first two tries, but this last time she got Nicholas Bonner. Now, he’s not a demon, says so himself, so I can’t even guess what he is, except old and bad and cute as a button. And clearly a chronic acquaintance of Sia’s, sort of like you and me, which leads us to Point C. Am I going too fast, or too weirdly?”

“No.” Seeing Farrell looking at her hands, she clasped them firmly together in her calm lap. “I’ve never met her, you know. She never comes to the League things with Egil. Ben. I think the Countess Elizabeth went to see her a few times.”

Farrell considered that, remembering the cat-faced, strudel-bodied woman who had teased his palm at the dance. “The mind reels. Right, okay, Sia. Who is Sia, what is she, that Ben is a completely different man, physically changed, because of living with her? That she can make a crazy drunk with a gun kneel and grovel and shoot himself in the leg, without touching him? That she can mess with your memory, speak languages that I know do not exist, and keep a vigorous young witch and a—a person of indeterminate species but great, great strength of purpose from coming into her house? I mean, this is no ordinary landlady, Jewel, it’s time to face facts. I will go further and say this is no ordinary marriage counselor. Incidentally, you are aware that we’re having our first high-level conference? I just didn’t think it should go unremarked.”