Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

Nicholas Bonner touched Aiffe’s shoulder, and she turned to him. Farrell could not hear what they were saying, but Nicholas was nodding at the owl, grinning his branding-iron grin, while Aiffe kept edging irritably away from him. Duke Frederik repeated, his voice increasingly hoarse and slow, “We are the Falconers’ Guild. The rule is implicit in the name, as it always was.”

Someone bumped Farrell from behind, and he turned to realize that the entire company were gradually drawing together, none looking at the next, cradling their hawks against themselves like maimed limbs. Even Hamid had moved close enough that Farrell could see the sharp brown cord jumping in his throat. Nicholas Bonner raised the horned owl’s perch slightly higher, and the bird hooted again, spreading wings as black and gray as Sia’s hair, wings so wide that the round body between seemed smaller than it was, almost fragile next to Micaela’s burliness. Garth de Montfaucon said wonderingly, “Implicit? Nay, what is implicit among such creatures as these, save what they do? What further aristocracy within a fellowship of killers and the lackeys of killers?” Duke Frederik began to answer him, but Garth wheeled away, snapping his fingers at Nicholas Bonner. “My lady daughter’s wood-devil will hunt now !”

No member of the Falconer’s Guild ever gave the same account of the following ten seconds. The Lady Criseyde swore bitterly that Nicholas Bonner had shaken the owl violently into the air, deliberately frightening and enraging it, while Julie remained forever certain that she had seen Aiffe herself calmly ordering the bird like any falconer with a glance and a single curt gesture. The Spanish wizard and the boy with the peregrine both claimed that the owl had flown up of its own volition before Garth finished speaking, though the boy insisted on its having actually hovered for an improbable instant until Nicholas Bonner’s cold cry sent it floating to the attack. As for Hamid ibn Shanfara, he said only, “Magic won’t cover up stupidity. You don’t have to be a witch to figure what’s likely to happen if you go shoving a horned owl in a falcon’s face. Magic didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

But what Farrell remembered was Aiffe’s hands. Long after time had taken such details as the undersea silence of the owl’s strike, the bronze eyes that never came fully open in the midday sun, even when Micaela rose shrieking through Duke Frederik’s desperate grasp, and the single dreamy flex of the flowering talons just before they took Micaela by the neck, Farrell remembered the triumph and misery of Aiffe’s hands. They had lunged upward with the owl in a clenched glory of control; but when they fell, they stopped at her mouth, palms out, fingers curling slowly, and remained there until the Lady Criseyde finally stood up with the gyrfalcon’s blood on her cheeks and the front of her gown. Then Aiffe’s hands came all the way down, and she held them flat against her sides, smiling like a queen on view while the Lady Criseyde cursed her. In Farrell’s memory of that moment, there was never any other sound, except later, when the owl began calling from the trees.

To one’s surprise or understanding, Farrell’s supervisor at the zoo was discovered early one morning in the Nocturnal Animals House, curled up on a ledge between a couple of drowsily annoyed kinkajous. He was given an indefinite leave of absence, and everyone even remotely connected with him was fired within the week, as if sad puzzlement were contagious. Farrell counted himself lucky not to be sprayed with pesticide and applied for an opening that Jaime, the peanut vendor, had told him about at an antique automobile restoration shop. The pay was less than at the zoo, and it meant being indoors more, but he liked the job from the first day, finding it delicately exhausting, oddly comforting work. The shop was close to the campus, so he usually had lunch with Julie.

“It isn’t so much anything I do,” he told her after a fortnight at the shop. “Mostly I just find parts and stick them on—the owners do the complicated stuff. But the air inside those cars is sixty years old. You open a door and somebody’s croquet summer comes billowing out at you. Teddy Roosevelt. Lydia Pinkham.”

“It’s always the smell,” Julie said. “All that hot, prickly upholstery just absorbed everything, sunlight and cigarette smoke, sweaty legs. I remember—when I smell an old Pontiac now, I think about my Uncle Mashi, but when I was little I used to think that Uncle Mashi smelled like an old Pontiac.”

Farrell nodded. “Maybe he did. Things get mixed up. The people who bring their cars into the shop, a lot of them look like the people who first bought those cars. It’s the clothes, partly, because they have fun dressing up to the cars, but it’s the faces more. They keep coming in, right out of those old summers, those brown family photographs. The way the League people look like paintings. I keep seeing them.”

“It’s what happens in groups,” she said. “People who get together because of a hobby or an obsession start to look a certain way. Boat people, backpackers, science fiction types, comic book collectors. Even short-wave radio freaks sort of have a look.”

“I don’t mean that,” Farrell said slowly. “I think I’m talking about people who mess with time, whether they know it or not. It’s like what Frederik said—maybe there’s really no present, just the past looping on and on. Yesterday I had to take some of the original paint off a 1912 Taylor, off the door, and all the time I was chipping and soaking and scraping that lovely, tough old paint away, I swear I could feel someone else putting it on. By hand, in a converted livery stable. I know how Frederik feels watching those hawks go up into time. Everything’s so close to everything else.”

He stopped, leaving a ragged hole in the conversation, through which Julie regarded him steadily and unsparingly. For the first time, he noticed a tiny triangular golden fleck in one brown iris that was not duplicated in the other. Her hair’s not as black as it used to be, in this light. Was it ever ? She said, “Even if I do resign from the League, you don’t have to. That’s entirely your business.”

“For what it’s worth, she didn’t really mean to kill Micaela,” Farrell said. “She was showing off.” The Falconers’ Guild had effectively disbanded within minutes of the gyrfalcon’s death, leaving Aiffe mistress of her father’s bylaws and a field strewn with torn rabbits and partridges. “I just don’t think she really meant it,” he repeated. “What the hell would have been the point?”

Julie said loudly and abruptly, “We have been through this discussion before.” She started to stand up, bumped her chair against the one behind her, knocked over Farrell’s carrot juice and spent the next few moments helping him to mop it up, all the while snarling, “Didn’t mean it? She means every damn thing she does, always has, ever since she learned how to make a boy who pulled her hair in fifth grade pull all his own hair out, snatch himself baldheaded.” The tables were as close and crowded as her words, and Farrell heard chair legs and Earth Shoes scraping as customers turned to stare. Julie said, “You really think you feel sorry for her. Poor Aiffe, poor skinny little twit, trying so hard to live up to this absurd, misplaced talent that keeps getting away from her. That’s not even pity, that’s contempt, and contempt is what gets people killed, do you hear me, Joe? She’ll do to you exactly what she did to that hawk, for exactly the same reason. To make you take her seriously.”

“I take her very seriously,” he protested.

But Julie was a flash flood, never giving him a moment to grab onto a rhetorical tree root or floating log. “The point? The point is that thing you keep missing, the point is power. Power doesn’t need to explain itself, power is all about not explaining. Power just does because it can.”