Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

At the same instant, Julie gripped Farrell’s wrist and said, “Look down.”

Farrell realized that, while they had all been gaping after the Aiffe-bird, the grotto and its surroundings had become a northern European forest, anciently dark with huge oaks, elms, ash trees, and maples, stretching almost as far as Farrell could see, to a snowy void that he looked at once, and then never again. There is no horizon. There is only where she lets go .

A little way from where he stood with Ben and Julie, an archer in red crouched under an elm tree, setting an arrow to his bowstring. When he rose, Farrell saw that his face was all of the same white nothingness, except for two pulsing amber absences that were his eyes. The Aiffe-bird tried to dodge the arrow, but it danced after her, tracking her frantic doublings and stooping wherever she fled, until there was nothing for her but to change shape in midair. The arrow flashed between her human neck and shoulder as she fell.

Julie made a little splintering sound in her throat; Ben shouted “Sia!” as if it were no name, but a blessing to armies; and Farrell, being who he was, heard himself deliriously singing snatches of a very old ballad about a king who learned to fly:

Aiffe tumbled, sprawling and flailing for a moment, before she righted herself and spoke sharply to the earth below her. The tearing branches leaned aside to let her light nakedness hurtle past, and the ground bulged and rippled up in whipped-cream solicitude, to gather her tenderly into a forgiving green lap, the breath not even jarred out of her. The ember followed her down, fluttering in a rather bored way, and vanished like a snowflake before ever reaching the ground.

Aiffe was on her feet instantly, with the spring of a boxer determined to show that it was a slip and not a knockdown. But the gesture clearly ate up the last of that wild energy that had, in one afternoon, created illusory beings and real storms, hurled thunderbolts, torn rocks and trees to pieces, and broken into a goddess’ sky, where Aiffe had flown as high as any hawk. Now she trudged through stillborn spells on stumbling feet, reduced to picking up handfuls of dirt and hurling them into the air, kicking stones and sand away on all sides. Behind her, Sia materialized slowly—lazily—out of the little showers of earth, the way she arrived out of blood and black stone long ago . She was dancing as she took shape, but it was a different dance this time, and she was different.

“No more,” she said inside Farrell, and with those words the great forest fled, and they were back in the vaguely pleasant little room that Farrell remembered, with the windows full of nothing but Avicenna twilight and an old man and woman laughing on a street corner. Sia was sitting calmly in her elusive chair facing Aiffe, who stared back at her from the middle of the room, dazedly plucking at the velvet gown which had been restored to her. Farrell, Ben, and Julie clung together by the dusty bookcases, while, in the furthest corner, Briseis kept tremulous watch over Nicholas Bonner. He was standing utterly still, arms at his sides, looking only at Sia. A terrible pity swept through Farrell then, and for once he could not turn his eyes away. What could he be but what he is, nothing but skin and spirit stretched unbearably over a black hole? What could he be but what she made when she was young ?

“No more,” Sia said again. Even sitting, she was still dancing, moving only her feet in languid patterns like an alchemist’s equations, as Aiffe moved more and more slowly. Sia’s hands opened to show that she was holding some of the sandy earth Aiffe had thrown aside—powdery bluewhite crystals in her right hand, red-gold in the other. She raised her hands and began to let the crystals drift to the ground. Aiffe screamed, the sound made horrifying by the immobility of her face. Julie started toward her, but Ben barred the way.

Sia smiled. Abruptly she tossed the golden crystals straight up, catching them in her left hand while the bluewhite stones were settling gently into her right. She seemed to be playing casually with the crystals, not juggling them, but allowing them to leap randomly from her hands like dolphins or flames, as they chose. Each time this happened, Aiffe half swayed, half lurched a few steps toward her, and then froze again as if the two were playing some sidewalk game together. Sia was singing once more, and this time Farrell understood every one of the dreadfully gentle words.

With every repetition, the crystals whirled upward, melting together for an emerald instant, just at the height of Aiffe’s eyes, then cascading back into order as unlikely as waterspouts catching fire, not one pebble dropped or in the wrong hand. They were spinning steadily faster, and Farrell took a long time to isolate the further moment when they vanished altogether, returning almost too quickly for their total absence to register. Even when he made himself realize that the crystals were dancing through Aiffe’s head on their way from one hand to the other, even then he would never have believed what he saw, except for the expression in her eyes, which were all she could move now. Sia sang:

The crystals flared brighter after each tiny, impossible disappearance, and each time Aiffe had dwindled that much more, as if the shining flecks were draining all her substance, emptying her of light and color and will. She was making a sound, nevertheless, a wordless, insect whine that could only have been produced by an adolescent faced with an unimpressed universe. The crystals had begun to form pictures as they flashed back and forth: flickering but distinct visions of horses and beaches, armored men clashing by torchlight— no, those are headlights, they’re fighting under a damn freeway —boxes of breakfast cereal, boxes splitting at the corners with mysterious hand-labeled jars and packets; buses and television commercials; and a loose-leaf school notebook, filled with magical symbols and diagrams drawn in multicolored felt-tip ink. The patterns looked exactly like Aiffe’s dances.

It’s all her life, it’s Rosanna Berry’s life burning out there, moment by moment. It’s burning, it’s all burning . He understood as well as he was ever to understand anything again that every image the crystals shaped was entirely real, ripped whole out of Aiffe’s mind— that’s Nicholas Bonner, I guess that’s her mother, that looks like a kid’s drawing of trees and maybe a dog —and that the pictures’ glow was literally the light of actual moments being forever consumed. The way they used to disembowel somebody and throw his guts in the fire right in front of him. To burn a life all up like that . A scene of naked people coupling and tripling in a field under a horned moon hissed and vanished, to be replaced by Garth de Montfaucon reading aloud from a Dr. Seuss book. Aiffe kept up that whine that made Farrell want to shake her. He said loudly, “Don’t. Don’t, Sia, don’t.”