Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

Farrell recounted his evening for her, lingering over any event that seemed to have a chance of making her laugh. Elizabeth Bathory’s pythons were no help, but his mimicry of knights and ladies arguing in the League talk about bilingual ballots was good for a small chuckle; and when he described the Lady Janet of Carterhaugh trying blindly to peel Sir Mordred off her headdress, he could feel Julie’s body easing in his arms and her amusement loosening and warming his own tense muscles. She said in some anxiety, “Your hand’s bleeding, there. What happened?”

Farrell took a careful breath. “The cat,” he said. “Aiffe bewitched it—Aiffe and him .” Like the Lady Janet’s Tam Lin, Julie changed as he held her, first to stone and immediately after to a bar of soap, skidding through his hands and starting out of the maze without looking back. Farrell followed, his bewilderment quickly giving way to anger. “Jewel, you are going to hear this, you hold up a damn minute.”

The path was too narrow for them to walk abreast, and he found himself lurching and half skipping after her, constantly off-balance, his face whipped by dry leaves and twigs every time he grabbed at her shoulder. He caught up with her a bend before the entrance and barred her way. She said, “Let me by, Joe,” but she did not try to push past him.

“This is dumb,” he said loudly. “You know how dumb this is? Other people can’t talk about their sex lives, they can’t talk about money, politics, the kids, each other’s driving. You and I, we only have two things we can’t talk about, and one of them is a fifteen-year-old twit with pimples and magical powers. I never heard of anything so stupid.”

Julie said, “I want to go home.” She took a step forward, but the California surfing bird whistled again, and she jumped in alarm, and then shouted, “Damn bird, you damn bird !” at the top of her lungs. As though her furious breath had reached them, the lights of the wedding feast, seen lilting like birthday candles through the maze’s patchy green walls, suddenly shivered and went out. A figure too tall to be quite human, shaped wrongly to be entirely human, was moving between the castle and the maze in a way that was not human at all. Julie backed silently against Farrell, who was grateful.

They heard the hoofbeats first, scraping deliberately on the courtyard stones, and then the voice. “The desire of increasing riches occupieth you, till ye come to the grave. Nay! but in the end ye shall know. Nay! once more, in the end ye shall know your folly. Nay! would that ye knew it with knowledge of certainty. Surely ye shall see hellfire. Then shall ye surely see it with the eye of certainty. Then shall ye on that day be taken to task concerning pleasures.” The cold, piercing drone might have rattled in the cavities of a naked skull, but Farrell had heard it before.

Beside him Julie made a little sound like Sir Mordred when he bit himself for the first time. The black horseman was leaning over the hedge, looking straight down at them. When he smiled, the faint parallel ridges rose on his cheeks, like gill slits. “My kingdom is four months’ journeying long and four months wide,” he said. “In my city, Timbuktu, which is the City of Wisdom, I have as many scribes and scholars as warriors and as many books as I have bars of gold. The throne where I give audience is of ebony, and great elephant tusks arch above my head. Three hundred slaves stand behind my throne. Before me and to my right there stands a giant holding a two-handed sword as big as a man, and to my left my spokesman waits with his mace of office to give my answers and my commands. To the end of my eyesight, the sun blazes off spears and trumpets, armor and jeweled trappings. And I sit in the center of the center of the world and I am not touched. Glorify the Compassionate, the Merciful. I am not touched.” As far as could be seen, he was completely naked.

“And that’s the other one,” Farrell managed to say. “Prester John.” But Julie whispered another name and ran out of the maze, leaving him to trail after her once again. The big horse danced heavily away from her quickness, and the black man on his back seemed to be dancing with him as he brought the animal to an easy halt just out of Julie’s reach. Farrell heard her call the name again—“ Micah ”—but only the California surfing bird responded.

“Mansa Musa is not touched,” the black man chanted. Farrell saw now that he was wearing a pair of dark trousers, glinting and sliding with the moonlight, and nothing more. “In Cairo the Sultan called me his brother and desired to embrace me, as the men do there, but Allah put him away. I handle neither ivory nor gold nor salt, that they may not handle me. My wives come to me in darkness, that not so much as their shadows in the moon may touch my body. Only Allah touches Mansa Kankan Musa.”

“It’s me,” Julie said hopelessly. “Micah, it’s me.” A tower door opened and closed, sounding very far away, but the courtyard was suddenly crowded with the laughter of people starting home from a party. For a moment, the black man’s immense eyes were upon Farrell, brown as old rivers, deepmuddy with decaying secrets, and streaked by thin, luminous currents and the slow backs of crocodiles. Then he kicked bare heels into his mount’s thick sides, and the horse lumbered through a judicious U-turn and trotted away past the fishpond, under the spiteful faces of the entryway, and on out into the expensively quiet streets beyond. The clopping echoes bounced back and forth between the condominiums long after the man and the horse were out of sight.

Farrell drew Julie back into the maze, for privacy’s sake, and let her cry. He was jealous at first— no one has ever cried for me that way, and no one ever will, I know this —but then Julie raised her face, gasping and hiccuping, and he saw clearly how she would look when she was old. “Baby,” he said, and began helplessly kissing lines and hollows and wounds that were not there yet, sick with tenderness and fear.

If you’ll look over on your left now, ladies and gentlemen,” Farrell said into the dashboard microphone, “we’re now passing the South American maned wolf.” In his rearview mirror, a dozen faces turned dutifully as directed; two or three others stared straight ahead, meeting his eyes with the wary contempt that certain children always show to magicians. What are you hiding from me while you let me see this ? Farrell smiled encouragingly into the mirror, but it only confirmed their suspicions, and he sympathized, having a touch of their complaint himself.

“Despite the name,” he went on, slowing the alligator train as it waddled past the yard where the two shaggy, cinnamon-toast-colored creatures trotted up and down on deer legs, “the maned wolf is actually a large fox—sort of a fox on stilts, as you can see.” He had tried several times to leave the official jokes out of his recitation, but management spies always reported him. “In the wild they live on rodents and insects, but here we feed them chicken and bananas. They’ll eat five pounds of bananas a day, just wolf ‘em right down.” Somebody laughed at that one, and Farrell daydreamed about stopping the train and demanding to know who it was.

The day was windy and warm, and children tumbled like bits of burning paper across the path of the alligator train. The sea lions were coughing croupily away behind the aviary, ringing bells and biting their bicycle horn. A young woman, wearing Army fatigues and a purple cartwheel hat, lifted a small boy out of the way and held him easily in her arms while she waved his hand to the train. Farrell waved back. The implacable faces in the mirror followed his gesture that time, to see if that was it.