Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

Their voices sounded fragile and very far away to Farrell—spider-ghosts scurrying hand over hand up the dusty pillars of light. He told Ben about Hamid’s warning and the circumstances of it. “Is that what Sia was talking about? Look, just tell me.”

Ben did not answer for a while, long enough for Farrell to become aware that Julie’s mail shirt had chafed several raw places on his neck and shoulders. Ben said at last, “She’s not always right, you know. And sometimes when she is right, it’s not in any way you could have imagined. Who knows what Sia means by death?”

The first sending exploded into being as they were informing Simon Widefarer that Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner were on the island. It looked like a raw, bloody stomach with a crocodile’s head, and it flew at them on wings edged with tiny mouths. Ben, Farrell, and Simon screamed and fell to the ground, and the creature flashed stinking over them; wheeling back for another go, making the sound of sucking mud. It had ridiculously bright blue eyes.

Half of Simon’s forces had been drawn into the plywood castle by now; the remainder—Hamid among them—were either off scouting, skirmishing, or helping to shore up the fortress’s rickety outer walls, as Farrell and Ben had found Simon doing. The structure was actually a good deal more solid than it looked, a fact proved conclusively by the time the second and third monster—one half-toad, half-gamecock, the other something like a pulpy Nutcracker Suite mushroom with yellow human teeth and a snake’s tongue—were streaking and circling low above the castle. At that point, so many yelling knights of the League had jammed through the entranceway and the two sally-ports that the entire castle should have been as flat as a split milk carton; but the walls remained upright, conveniently for the sendings, who perched on them. More and more came banging into being: goat-legged viscera, fanged cacti, huge, houndfaced slugs, creatures like stuffed toys oozing sewage, creatures like tall skeletal birds with fire pulsing between their ribs. Without exception, they smelled of carnivores’ excrement; and they kept coming, inexhaustible nightmare hybrids, chattering like parakeets, snuffling like bears. They dive-bombed, those who fled; they swooped low to snap and jeer at hysterical knights rolling on the ground; they overran the red sundown, leaving just enough daylight to see them by. Aiffe’s children , Farrell thought, and thought that he laughed into the trampled brown grass.

Beside him, Ben grunted, “Fuck this ,” and stood up, brushing sendings away from him like gnats. “Absolutely harmless,” he announced loudly. “Low-budget special effects, might as well be afraid of a slide show. Let’s get on with the war.” He walked briskly toward the castle, picking up a hammer and a handful of nails to work on the weakened frame. Farrell followed, shoving after him through hot clouds of hovering phantasms. He always swore that one of them lit on his shoulder for a moment, and that the stench lingered in the tunic ever afterward. He never wore the tunic again and finally burned it one night, years later, when he was drunk.

“She’s very good,” Ben said quietly. “If he hadn’t been pushing her a bit too hard, we’d have been in big trouble.”

“Those things aren’t real,” Farrell offered cautiously. Ben shook his head irritably, hammering in a corner support. “Not quite, not yet. They will be. Another month, another week. The least little bit overtrained, that’s all,” He might have been talking about a distance runner. “I certainly wonder what she’ll try now.”

The sendings kept at it a while longer, increasingly petulant rather than menacing, badgering Simon’s knights for attention as the men returned to the castle in shaky, shamefaced twos and threes. A veil was thickening between them and the day they had raided; and by the time Hamid ibn Shanfara drifted in, they had been reduced almost to misshapen pigeons cadging handouts around park benches. Abruptly they twitched out of existence all at once, as if a single switch had shut them down. The late light came back, turning shadows green and gold, showing a good hour yet to sunset. Ben said again, “Now what?”

“Ah, as to that,” Hamid murmured in his legend-voice. “As to that, perhaps someone espied two handsome children in the wood, not twenty minutes since, and perhaps one said to t’other, ‘Nay, but you’ll not do this thing, I forbid it, so.’ And meseems the little girl gave him the lie straight away, saying for answer, ‘Forbid yourself , turkey. This shit is boring , and I am about to lose the damn war, messing around like this and the sun going down. Behold and stand back, for I will get myself some real help right now.’ But t’other was wondrous wroth, and says he, ‘For your life, you dare not! This is nothing for you, this is more than you can yet hold, on my word, sweet sister, on my word.’ And it might be she laughed at him, and perhaps someone heard her say then, ‘You have no word, and I told you when I summoned you first that I can handle anything I can call. And so I can, Jack, with or without you, I got it down !’ And it is said that he railed further at her folly, but perhaps not. A bard must say only what he knows.” He bowed slightly to Ben and Farrell and began rewinding his turban, amazingly immaculate.

Simon Widefarer was inside the plywood castle, spacing his men thinly along the walls to meet the sunset attack. Farrell was startled to realize how greatly their numbers had been reduced; between losses in battle and a dozen suspicious injuries, Simon was captain only of some sixteen exhausted knights besides himself. At first, he would not part with even one when Ben and Farrell repeated Hamid’s tale to him and urged a scouting expedition. “Not if she were coming down on us with all of Charlemagne’s paladins. What use is the knowledge now?” But Ben pressed the need fiercely, and Simon finally yielded, saying, “Let him go then—” He pointed to Farrell. “—and him .” He indicated the Scots laird Crof Grant, plaided to the eyebrows and topped off by a bonnet like a Christmas fruitcake, sagging with red and green clan badges, erupting with plumes enough to reconstruct the whole ostrich. Simon said, “I cannot spare Egil Eyvindsson from the defense, but two such will leave us little weaker.” Farrell felt as if he had once again been chosen last at stickball.

Skulking through the brush with Crof Grant was a reasonably similar experience to the time Farrell had tried to smuggle a pool table out of a fourth-floor walk-up at midnight. In the first place, Grant’s costume refused entirely to skulk, but caught on anything that made a noise, including Farrell; in the second, the man himself never ceased to prattle, in a constant warm spatter of glottals and occlusives, of the countless Sassenach rogues fallen that day to his trusty claymore. Hushing him did no good at all, since he was talking louder than Farrell dared raise his own voice. He was in the middle of a singlehanded stand against three foes armed with morgensterns, armored in crushing youth—“Losh, laddie, gin ye add their years thegither, ye’d hae no mair than my ain”—when they came into a clearing and saw Garth’s men waiting silently for them.

To do Crof Grant justice, he said only, “Hoot-toot,” before he started running. Farrell lingered for a deadly instant, not out of surprise or paralysis, but because of the five men grouped close behind Aiffe where she stood with her father. At first glance there was little to tell them from the rest of Garth’s tattered forces, grim alike with weariness; but Farrell had seen the yellow-eyed man in Sia’s house, and he had understood Aiffe’s challenge to Nicholas Bonner. Oh, my lord, she does have it down . Then Aiffe saw him and laughed and pointed, and one of the strange knights bent a bow at him so fast that he never saw it happen. The arrow sighed in his left ear, sinking itself out of sight in a juniper bush.