Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

“Oh, must have been,” Farrell agreed heartily. “Especially knowing exactly where he was and all.” Sour as a thirteenyear-old, he added, “If you think I’m going to ask how you came by that bit of specialized information…”

The swift mischief that had stopped his breath at their first meeting sauntered through Sia’s eyes and was gone. “From her,” she said, nodding at Briseis, who was sitting asleep on Farrell’s foot.

Farrell washed the dishes and went to his room. His practicing went badly that night, and he kept dreaming about falling out of boats. Aiffe and Ben were always in them with him, and Aiffe usually wanted to rescue him, but Ben never let her.

From then on, it was most often Farrell who missed dinner, occasionally breakfast, and once or twice an entire weekend. His absences were legitimate enough—rehearsing with Basilisk demanded much more than one night a week, even when no performances were scheduled. As a practical matter, all of the group’s arrangements had to be adapted to include a lute; on a more elusive level, there was the whole question of Basilisk itself adapting to Farrell’s particular sound and style, and he to the consort’s. Farrell expected this, having been through similar rituals before. What he had not quite bargained for were the picnics, nor the impromptu potlucks, beach barbecues, volleyball games, and backpacking excursions, to all of which he was constantly being invited. He complained mildly to Hamid at one point. “Don’t they ever stop being family ? I like the music fine, but the hugging is wearing me out.”

“Village thinking,” Hamid said. “The League tends to foster that stuff, what with all the baronies and the guilds and the fellowships and such. You encourage people to be thinking in terms of small groups, tribes, that gets real natural real easy, you don’t just turn it off.” He smiled his long, disquieting smile that showed only the tips of his teeth, and added, “The Middle Ages were like that, of course. You could live out your whole life inside a few square miles.”

Farrell said, “They really are good. I have to push to keep up with them. It’s learning on the job, too, I’m already playing gigs. We did a private party for Duke Claudio and his wife last week. That was strange, I don’t know if I liked it or not. Nobody broke character for a minute, not even when the phone rang or a fuse blew, and they even fed us in the kitchen, the way you did with musicians. Good thing they didn’t have stables.”

Hamid’s grin sharpened. “You wait till you play someplace like Dol Amroth or Storisende.” Farrell recognized the names from Tolkien and Cabell. Hamid shook his head with great deliberateness, blowing daintily on his fingertips. He said, “Places like that, you truly get to wondering when in the world you are.”

He walked away from any further questions and Julie was only a bit more forthcoming when Farrell went to her. “Households,” she said. “There are four or five real ones—four, I guess, Rivendell keeps breaking up and starting over. They’re like communes, not even that organized. People sharing the rent, taking turns cooking, shopping, working in the garden, arguing over who changes the cat box this week. We’ve both lived in a dozen places like that.”

“Except that we weren’t all playing the same game all the time.”

Julie simply laughed at him. “Weren’t we? Come on, where you and I lived everybody was conspiring to bomb the Pentagon, or anyway jam up their plumbing. Or it was the great quest for the perfect plural marriage, the permanently correct position on Cuba, the all-time guru, the ultimate compost heap. It was just the same, Joe, just as uniform. And you fit in or you moved on to some other group.”

“Did Prester John move on?” Farrell had lately taken to using the name like a depth charge, maliciously toppling it into placid conversation with League members and waiting to feel the water rupture and convulse far below the twinkling surface.

But Julie said only, “I guess,” and went on fitting a new cartridge into one of her drawing pens. When Farrell pushed further, her voice abruptly became high and monotonous, whining with tension like an electric fence. “He freaked out, Joe, let it alone. He moved on, right. He overdosed on everything, one more Parnell burnout, all right? Let it alone.” There were tears swelling her eyes, shivering on the lower lids, and Farrell went to make tea.

Since the dance, she had not accompanied him to any of the League functions, brusquely pleading either work or weariness. The Lady Criseyde had invited him to play for her weekly dance classes; and once he went alone to a crafts fair sponsored by the artisans’ and armorers’ guilds, and spent the day talking with pony-tailed boys who knew South German plate armor from Milanese, and Peffenhauser’s work from Colman’s, and with a former chemistry professor whose suits of armor weighed eighty pounds and sold for three thousand dollars. There were two swordsmiths and a specialist in the manufacture of mauls and flails, and there was one who only made the great padded gauntlets that most of the fighters used. Farrell learned that chopsticks were by far the best tools for packing the stuffing down in the glove, and that a one-pound lead sinker made the most successful pommel weight for a tournament mace.

Hamid and Lovita took him to his first tournament, which was staged in Barton Park, though not at the clearing where the Birthday Revels had been held. It was one of the League’s rare open exhibitions, and nonmembers in ordinary dress thronged among the cartoon-colored pavilions, the hedges of bemonstered appliqué banners, and the blazons strung on wire between the trees. Farrell saw Simon Widefarer cut down three novice knights trying to earn their spurs, and King Bohemond defend himself with surprising dexterity in the slow-motion ballet of maul-fighting. Garth de Montfaucon glided victorious out of a roaring mêlée, leaving four of his six opponents hobbling and gasping; and Farrell stood cold on tiptoe to see the ridiculous moustachios prowling down the lists, eyes squinted nearly shut, the lean body humping below the shoulders like a ferret’s body, or that of any other creature that found you in the earth by your smell. In the moment of Garth’s acclamation, his eyes sought out Farrell in the crowd, and he lifted his sword in mocking challenge. Farrell knew that it was only rattan, but its polished length gleamed in the sun like the real sword, Joyeuse, and he was glad when Garth turned away. Darrell Sloat. Remedial reading. Doesn’t help .

He did bring Julie to dinner at Sia’s house and regretted it before the introductions were over. Strangers, the two of them reacted to each other with the immediate ease of long old detestation. Farrell spent the evening bridging grim silences by desperately teasing childhood reminiscences out of Ben, and in watching Sia probe and test and bait her guest more rudely than he had ever known her to do, while Julie responded with increasingly monosyllabic sarcasm. She went home early with a headache and hardly spoke to Farrell for two days. The most she ever said about that first encounter was, “We didn’t want to like each other. Leave it there.”

On the eve of the summer solstice, they went together to the greenwood wedding of a psychiatric nurse called Sir Tybalt the Belligerent with the Lady Alisoun de la Fôret, a teaching assistant at the university. The marriage took place at sunset, on a beach where swimming had been indefinitely forbidden because of sewage spills. Basilisk played during the ceremony, which was performed by a barefoot mendicant friar, and Hamid sang Love Me or Not, Love Her I Must or Die afterward, with Farrell accompanying him and the costumed guests dancing slowly in a circle around the bride and groom. They then went on to the wedding feast, guided by two Italian mercenaries, one Druid, and two tumble-breasted Elizabethan strumpets who had all managed to crowd into Madame Schumann-Heink. Farrell drove as their tumultuous consensus directed him, further into the hills than he had ever gone, until he fishhooked around a blind curve into a wide avenue dotted with redwood condominium complexes, turned right again at a ranch-style church with a satellite dish on the lawn, and pulled up in the shadow of a canary-yellow castle. Beside him Julie said, “Storisende.”