Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

“Will you for God’s sake cry?” Farrell demanded. “You’re going to hurt yourself if you don’t cry.” But Ben shook his head and walked away toward a second rowboat about to put out from shore. Farrell stood looking at the water, imagining Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner sliding swiftly along in their kayak, tucked in snugly between the little dark waves. A large seagull followed the rowboat most of the way, swooping low as if to snap up the last herring-bright scatterings of daylight in its wake.

Crof Grant’s death was set down to a heart attack. He had, in fact, a minor history of coronary complaints and had been advised against overexertion. The story made good copy and stayed in Bay Area papers for several days, not so much because of the police investigation, which was unimaginatively thorough, as because Crof Grant’s widow threatened to sue the League for Archaic Pleasures for thirty-five million dollars. According to the press, she blamed the League not only for her husband’s death, but for most of his life as well, from the decline of his professional reputation to his occasional attacks of gout, his increasing lapses of memory, passed-up offers of better jobs elsewhere, and the general decay of their marriage. “We couldn’t go anywhere! Half the time I couldn’t even understand what he was saying, and then suddenly he’s challenging the headwaiter to a duel for being an English sympathizer. The children wouldn’t even come to see us. Those goddamn people turned a perfectly good husband and father into the goddamn Master of Ballantrae.”

She never got around to filing the lawsuit, but she did hire a private investigator, who took his job seriously. He was visible long after the reporters had disappeared, patiently seeking out and questioning almost every man who had been on Cazador Island during the War of the Witch. His time and energy were completely wasted, in a sense, since the only ones beside Farrell who had actually seen Crof Grant die were presumably back home in the early Middle Ages; but he made people nervous, even so, and there began to be resignations. Too many strange, serious wounds had come home from this particular war; too many men were waking out of too-similar nightmares about fanged flying intestines or trying to talk of the sunset battle, and five faces with no more pity in them than the sunset itself, and always giving up the attempt with the same shrinking, half-imploring shrug. The detective told Crof Grant’s widow that he strongly suspected the presence of drugs in the case. She said she just knew it, and to keep digging after those goddamn people. “Sixty-one years old, as much sense as a rutabaga, and they killed him with their goddamn drugs. It explains everything .”

The reporters came back for the funeral, since it was attended—at the insistence of Crof Grant’s will—by a large formal delegation from the League, in full costume. Farrell stood with Julie and a couple of Grant’s muttering art department colleagues, watching as the plumes, hennins, capes, kirtles, tabards, gipons, mantuas, roquelaures, and pelerines flashed through the waxy air of the funeral chapel and swept bowing before the coffin. The League gained fourteen new members within the week, more than matching the resignations.

Farrell also appeared to be the only person to have seen Aiffe on the island during the war. Garth’s men denied categorically that she had ever led or sorcerously aided them, and two witnesses beside her father swore that she had spent that entire weekend visiting cousins in Cupertino. Farrell told Julie everything that he had seen happen, from Aiffe’s tantric coupling with Nicholas Bonner to Ben’s rage of despair over the death of Egil Eyvindsson, somewhere around the year 880. Julie listened silently until he finished, and then asked, “What are you going to do about it?” She had wept for Crof Grant with a vehemence that surprised Farrell, who had seen no one else do it.

“Well, I’ll talk to that guy she hired,” he said, “I don’t plan to go looking for him, but when he comes to check me out, I’ll tell him what I know. Fair?” Julie seemed satisfied enough, which pleased Farrell. In a burst of candor, he added, “I really hope he doesn’t show up, but I’ll try to tell him.” He truly meant to keep his word.

But the investigator did come to find him at work, and in the end Farrell lied to him, like everyone else in the League, by coffee and omission. “Jewel, it wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference. In the first place, he wouldn’t have believed a word of it, any more than the cops—I mean, I could feel that—and in the second place… Listen to me. In the second place, what difference would it make if he did believe me? The guy who killed Grant is eight hundred years out of town, over the border. We don’t have any extradition treaties with the twelfth century.”

As always when she was really angry, Julie looked as if she were about to laugh. “The person who killed him is watching TV, doing a little babysitting for pocket money, and so delighted she can’t stop hugging herself. She’s getting clean away with murder, and now she knows she can get away with it anytime she wants, because nobody will ever say a word, no matter what they see. You have just personally handed her the whole damn League, from which I have just this minute resigned.” Farrell started to protest, but she said, “Joe, get out of here. I really want you to leave me alone for awhile. I’ll call when I feel like talking to you again. Go on, Joe, now.” He left without looking back, pointedly careful not to slam her front door.

Furious, bitterly defensive, trying himself on her charges a dozen times a day and acquitting himself each time, with no discernible effect on his sadness, Farrell spent the next two weeks either working, practicing with Basilisk for the Whalemas Tourney—the lute back had been expensively repaired, and everyone told him that it sounded as good as ever, but it didn’t—or shopping and running errands for Sia. Ben was ill for some days after the war—Sia said it was flu—but then went immediately back to the graduate seminar on the Haraldskvaeoi that he had been conducting all summer. He seemed perfectly functional—and completely without spirit, not so much listless as somehow exiled, a squatter in his own body, a refugee enduring one more camp. A student, encountered at Farrell’s thirty-sixth viewing of La Belle Et La Bête , told him that Ben had lately taken to breaking off during readings to stare at his class out of blankly frightened eyes without saying another word for the rest of the period. “Sometimes he makes these sounds. Not crying, just these sounds , in his chest, over and over; I have to leave when he starts doing that. Or he’ll start singing, right in the middle of an argument about word position, these crazy old pieces of Norwegian fishing songs. They’re going to find out about him.”

Farrell told Sia, who said that she knew and said little else. More even than Ben, she appeared to be slipping into a chilling solitude, neglecting her counseling work, her weaving, her carving, to stump through the house in ponderous silence, attended always by the wistful clicking of Briseis’ claws. Her prowling was not at all aimless; Farrell was entirely certain that she was looking for something real and specific that she needed badly, but he knew well enough that it would not be something he could help her to find. Once he woke knowing that she was standing just beyond the door of the guest bedroom; but when he opened it, he saw her with her back to him, gazing so intently at a blank wall that she did not hear him when he spoke to her. “What is it, what are you looking at? Sia, what can I do?” She answered him without turning, but not in any language he knew. After a while, Farrell went back to bed. He lay awake for the rest of the night and, if she moved at all from that spot, he never heard her.