Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

He never knew whether he had truly broken Sia’s concentration, bent so absolutely on Aiffe that, in a way, nothing but Aiffe seemed real, nor did he ever allow himself the illusion of having affected Aiffe’s fate one way or the other. But the wheeling crystals did falter for a moment, Sia did turn slightly toward him, and in that moment Nicholas Bonner made the only move left to him. Knocking Briseis aside, he sprang forward in a bound that covered half the room— the laughing golden frog squatting in the redwood grove that first night —shrieking, “Now, sweet witch, now, save me as I save you, now, now!” and batting madly at the tiny lights swarming around Aiffe’s head. Several of the wild blows struck Aiffe herself as she staggered sideways, but it was Sia who cried out.

The crystals blazed up so brightly that even Sia took a step backward. Farrell kept his eyes as wide open as he could, although he saw the world in aching, molten shadows for days afterward. The colors ran and flooded together in a motley bubble shimmering around Nicholas Bonner. Farrell could not hear his scream, but he felt it, like a saw going through the bone. Nicholas Bonner pounded his fists against turquoise, cold, smoky crimson, and great blowing drifts of amber, but he might have been another silent image, burning to ashes with the rest of Aiffe’s memory. The bubble tightened around him, and he fell, started to get up, then abruptly tumbled over, curling into a fetal position, knees drawn hard to his chest, head tucked between folded hands, lightning-colored eyes wide as a dead man’s. The slack lips were saying a single word, mother , over and over.

Sia dawned out of her chair. There was no movement involved, nothing to do with breath and muscle and leverage, only that slow, immense arising in freedom from everything mortal. Farrell tried to look straight at her, to see her truly, but a monster would have been more comprehensible, a black stone more human. What went to answer her son’s despair was a shape that Farrell’s senses could not contain and a light that his spirit simply could not bear. This is why you’re not ever supposed to see the gods naked . So he looked at Julie and Ben instead, and Julie looked back at him, but Ben was far away, moving toward the light.

It took Sia forever to reach the crystal bubble, but forever was no time at all. However long her journey really lasted, she was there while Farrell’s ill-used and completely mutinous eyes were still reporting to him that she was crossing the room, was stretching out her arms, and was beginning to say a word that he knew must be Nicholas Bonner’s real name. The bubble waited for her, matching her light with its own; but behind the slippery flames, it had already grown thick-walled and opaque, almost hiding Nicholas Bonner. Sia took hold of it.

Rather, she took hold in it, for her hands passed straight through the crystal fires and disappeared within the bubble— how far is she, how far has she gone in there, which is she, which is she ? For an instant, Sia and the bubble were one—a single blinding silence like a star, endlessly devouring itself. Ben was as close to it as his body would let him go, shouting in a language that Farrell had never heard. Farrell had a moment’s glimpse of Aiffe with her head thrown back and her skinny arms waving randomly. He was never quite certain whether she had been merely fighting for balance, trying to knit one last reflexive spell together while Sia was unmindful of her, or something somewhere between the two. Julie pinioned her and held her firmly, taking no chances.

Then Sia was there again in the form they knew, her hands empty, her mouth opening to utter a howl of hopeless pain that would surely rattle the real stars in their courses and shake gods down out of the heavens like scurrying cockroaches. But the cry never came, and Farrell could not breathe for the dreadful wrongness of that denial. The bubble disappeared. Unlike every other picture that the crystals had made, this one was not followed by any other bright vision. It was just gone, and a very old woman was sinking almost weightlessly to a floor no more solid than herself, and the windows were now saying that it was earlier than it had been, not yet dusk at all.

Ben picked Sia up and carried her back to her chair, which altered its shape to keep her from falling again. He was still speaking to her in the strange language that sounded like a storm trying hard to be gentle. Sia’s eyes were closed, but her chuckle was as tenderly malicious as always. She said, “For what it is worth, my dearest Ben, my best Ben, you are the only human who ever learned even that much of my talk. Speak it to yourself sometimes, just to remember me.” Ben put her fingers to his mouth and whispered against them.

Farrell asked, “What happened to Nicholas Bonner? After what he tried to do, after everything, you were fighting that bubble, those crystals for him.”

Still with her eyes closed, she said, “The crystals of time. I did a foolish thing. I meant to punish that girl in the way that we punish, that we have to punish such pride. I meant to strip her of every memory except that she had offended the gods and must do penance forever.” When she looked at Farrell, he saw the huge stone woman with the dog’s head once again, and she smiled, nodding slightly. “But time is not mine to control,” she said, “only to tease a little. Time is everyone’s enemy, especially of the gods. My son got in time’s way, that is all, like any child running into the street after a ball. No more to it than that, really.”

“But you went after him,” Farrell persisted. “You tried to bring him back, you got in the way too.”

Sia rested her head on Ben’s hand, letting her eyes sag shut again. “And got run over for my vanity,” she answered in a voice too weary even for impatience. “There was never any hope, not from the moment he touched those crystals. But he is my son, mine to deal with, mine to banish, and what is between us is between us alone. So I did what I could do, but he will never come back anymore. Time has hold of him at last.”

The windows of the room were going out as Farrell watched them, and the familiar white nothingness was stirring beyond. Sia said, “You must go now, all of you, quickly. I will hold the way clear for you as long as I can.”

Ben said, “Sia, I am not going.” She answered him in the other language, and he turned away and stood staring at the fading walls.

Sia turned her head to find Julie in the dimness. She said, “You are very brave and merciful. Kannon will always come to you in your need.” Aiffe stood quietly in Julie’s grasp, her eyes terribly tranquil, frowning as if at a pointless question. Only her mouth shivered just a bit—a fishing line taken and run out by something far too massive and wild for its strength.

Julie said, “I don’t want her. I don’t want the gods ever to help me. I hate the gods.”

Sia nodded seriously, even approvingly. “Of course, that is only sensible. We are a terrible lot, we have no fairness, no honor, no sense of proportion. How could you not hate us ?” Julie looked away in her turn, and Sia grinned then, momentarily youthful with mockery. “But we do have charm, and most of us are very good social dancers.” Julie did not answer her.

“And sometimes we grant wishes that people never know they have made,” the old woman went on. She took a ring from her finger and held it out to Farrell. It was gold, the color of new bread, fashioned in the shape of a thick, soft, drowsily coiled serpent with a suggestion of a woman’s breasts. The one visible eye was long and empty, a slash of a darkness that Farrell had seen before. Sia said, “It is not magic, it has absolutely no useful powers. It will do nothing at all for you but remind you of me.”