Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

It was like being at a League tourney that went on forever, without dancing or jugglers. In a certain fashion, matters obeyed the vague rhythms of a real campaign, lurching back and forth between the various outworks and the shore, but continually breaking off for innumerable ritualized and irrelevant personal combats. All action halted in any quarter when it was shouted that Brian des Rêves was blade to blade with Olaf Holmquist, or that Raoul of Carcassonne and the Ronin Benkei, each with a sword in one hand and a cudgel in the other, were holding six knights something more than at bay in a poison-oak ravine. The rest of it was dust, prickly sweat, squatting boredom, aimless running and ducking into bushes, occasional flurries of pushing and falling down, the bustling of the black-clad referees, and eternally the idiot yells of “Yield thee, recreant!” and “To me! To me! House of the Bear, here to me!” Garth’s tactics continued to be no more imaginative than Simon Widefarer’s, but it was obvious that no one truly cared which side gained or lost ground—the fighting was all, and Farrell wondered that he should ever have expected it to be any other way.

There was no sign or sense of Aiffe, nor of Nicholas Bonner, and Farrell found himself almost disappointed. Ben was hardly more visible than they, for all his fearsome reputation. Farrell glimpsed him now and then, at a distance, on the trailing edge of some flanking attack or mop-up maneuver; but so far he figured nowhere in Hamid’s evolving chronicle of the War of the Witch. Mathgamhain fell at midafternoon, not in battle, but of what appeared to be acute indigestion, and he was followed in quick order by four similar cases and three of sunstroke. Farrell remembered William the Dubious’ prediction and would have thought little more of this, but then the injured started coming in. Two had apparently fallen into deep pits that opened beneath their feet; three others had been knocked half-senseless by branches falling from great redwoods. Hamid, skillfully bandaging a victim, looked across him at Farrell and said, “Methinks, man.”

“Me, too,” Farrell said. But he was hot and grubby and unable at present to think seriously about anything but beer. While Mathgamhain’s men were choosing a new captain from among themselves, he wandered away among the trees until he came to a clear-trodden path that he thought led to Glendower’s Oak, where the slain and the captive alike went, and where there might be something on hand other than William’s stickily dangerous mead. The woods seemed thicker and wilder here, laced with deep, luminous alleys, and the air tasted of old silence. Farrell began to play softly as he walked—a Latin drinking song that Chaucer had known—and presently paused to retune the lute to a more suitable mode. But for that halt, he might not have heard Aiffe’s voice directly ahead of him nor had time to lie down by the path among tree roots and long grass. He could not see her, because his cheek was tucked hard against spongy bark and his eyes were shut. He knew beyond the absurdity of it that she would find him if he opened his eyes.

“Nay, this is mine,” she was saying, “this is my triumph and no other’s. But for the piffling form of it, I’d face them singlehanded, with no knights at my back, no father to serve as my front and weary me with counsel. And no dorky Nicholas Bonner, neither, to tell me what I may and mustn’t do. Just me, just Aiffe—gods, what a wonder.” Her fierce snicker actually resounded in the lute, and Farrell quickly smothered its tiny answer against his belly.

Silken old laughter responded to hers just as the lute had done. “What, no sweet Nicholas Bonner, then, to nourish your glory? A summer’s apprenticeship, and you’ll pension me off and make your way alone? Greedy, thankless child, you wound my heart.”

“I was never your stupid apprentice,” she answered angrily. “You’re in this world because of my power, but you’ve got none of your own—I know that for sure, anyway. And yeah, I do think I’ve learned just about all you’ve got to teach me, what do you think about that ?” The voices had stopped approaching, and Farrell opened one eye a little way.

She was standing no more than fifty feet from him, facing Nicholas Bonner on the path. They were dressed alike as squires in boots, hose, and rather faded doublets, though Aiffe’s hair was hidden by a hooded cape, while Nicholas Bonner wore only an owl’s feather in his melon-yellow mane. He said, indulgently malicious, “And that little matter of the old woman who left you drooling in the Street? You’d handle her without me?”

Aiffe snorted, derisive and uncomfortable at once. “Maybe yes, maybe no. She’s your old woman, your big thing, you handle her. I’ve got no problem with her, except that she’s too strong. I don’t like people to be that strong.”

Nicholas Bonner’s voice was as soothing as sunlit mist. “Well, we’re here to learn how strong you are, my own sweeting. This toy war of theirs is your tiltyard, your testing ground—let’s see what you can do, then. The small plagues were an exercise; you could have done those in your sleep—in fact, you have.” He was stroking her, slipping his hands under the cape. “Time now for something a bit more demanding.”

Aiffe sighed and giggled, letting the cape fall from her. “Why do you always want to do this? You don’t get anything out of it; you think I don’t know? Why do you want it?”

Nicholas Bonner answered her honestly and with something close to dignity. “Dear love, I enjoy exactly what you enjoy, and that is the sensuality of power. There is no other pleasure I can take, even if I would. Yet each time we couple, you and I, something moves, something is born, as it is with real people. I am well content.” When he laid her down on the cape, her small, round breasts butted at him like cats.

Farrell began to crawl slowly backward, away from the path, but he had covered only a few yards when a heavy body pinioned his own, kneeing the breath out of him, and a hand went over his mouth. Ben whispered, “Don’t move.” Farrell squirmed his head to the side and saw him, face dark with dirty sweat, helmet askew and one of the horns badly chipped. Aiffe was chanting, the cold words whining out of her in the same rhythm with which Nicholas Bonner entered. Farrell watched them, rapt and ashamed, until Ben nudged him and they scrabbled off into comforting brambles. When Farrell looked back, he thought the air was shivering and sliding where Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner lay, like the air over the classroom radiator, that first school winter. Thought you were going blind at the age of seven .

“How did they get here?” he asked. “Simon’s had people patrolling the shore all day.”

Ben shook his head, immediately professorial, even wearing bear claws. “Simon’s been watching the only three places where a rowboat can beach. That’s not patrolling. Patrolling is when you keep an eye out for things like kayaks. They just slipped in from the Marin County side, easy as you please. Who needs magic?”

The leaves whirred softly overhead, like bicycle pedals, as they made their way back across the island. A Cooper’s hawk ripped down through the slanting light, striking for something almost at their feet, then flapped up into an ash tree, where it sat panting hard and staring at them furiously. Farrell said, “That’s not just your garden-variety quickie going on back there. That is machinery.”

“Tantric sorcery. Sex magic. Really effective if you know what you’re doing, dynamite if it gets loose. Sort of like Leg-O’s—you can make all kinds of really unpleasant stuff with it. Sia said they’d be using that.”

“What else did she tell you?”

Ben shrugged, smiling wearily. “Hard to remember. I mean, she woke me up, dumped me out of bed, damn near dressed me, and shoved me into that van. She kept saying something terrible was going to happen, and I was to stay with you all day. And a pain in the ass it has been, I may add, trying to fight and watch over you at the same time. I haven’t been doing either one very well.”