Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

“As long as you tell me when you find Sia. You will find her, old buddy. Nobody else could, but you will.”

The morning that he set out was glass-crisp, not rounded off with fog but sharp-cornered, making him sneeze when he inhaled deeply. Ben helped him pack the last of his belongings into Madame Schumann-Heink, where Briseis had insisted on spending the night. He said very little, and Farrell was the one who volunteered, “This is lonely. Leaving’s never been lonely for me before. I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you a lot,” Ben said. “I know you’re going on my quest, and it feels really strange. But I can’t go with you.”

“Of course you can’t. You’ve got your work, you’ve got a whole life to keep together, like Julie. She sent for me because I’m the one who’s still just messing around.”

“That’s not the reason.” Ben petted Briseis, speaking directly to her. “Tell your mistress that I will love her all my life and that I’m as angry as I can be at her for leaving me when I needed her. I know it’s presumptuous and insulting, but you tell her. You tell her I’m angry.” Briseis licked his hand, and Ben said, almost inaudibly, “Tell her I do speak her language to myself.”

Farrell drove Julie to work for the last time. Neither of them spoke at all. They held hands all the way, even when Farrell had to shift gears. When he parked near her office, she got down by herself, walked around to the driver’s side and pulled him halfway through the window to kiss him. “Be careful,” she said. “You’re the only one I’ve ever had.”

“The only one what?” There was no way to avoid asking the question, and they were both laughing when she replied, “Ah, if we only knew that. Wouldn’t we be somewhere then?” She kissed him again and walked away without saying good-bye. Farrell found this oddly hopeful and reassuring, since he had never known Julie to say good-bye, and they had always seen each other again.

“Pilot to navigator,” he announced to Briseis. “Which the hell way?” Briseis bounced her paws on the dashboard and whined in the general direction of the Bay. Farrell waited until Julie was out of sight, then put the bus in gear.

Leaving the campus, he spotted a red-haired man in a three-piece suit who looked like a game-show host, standing next to a hot-pretzel barrow, screaming out his timetable for the arrival of the Antichrist. Farrell said to Briseis, “Look at that. They’re all over the place, preaching to muggers in the rain, converting fire hydrants, absolutely crazy as jaybirds. But they have to do it, they have to tell people what God tells them, they’re all on quests, too. And here I go sliding on by, just as easy and civilized, and nobody knows I’m asking a dog to tell me which turn-off I take to find our goddess. A remarkable thing.”

Passing a high school that looked like a Moorish air-base, he drove slowly, growling at the adolescents who drifted across his path without ever looking up, clearly rendered invulnerable by their Walkmans. Four girls in long skirts were coming toward him, walking abreast, advancing like a curtain of bright rain. One girl was Aiffe. She walked in the middle of the group, giggling and fooling, leaning on one friend to adjust her sandal, on another to yelp with laughter, shoving them with her hips and flinging her arms over their shoulders. Farrell heard her whoop, “But he’s so dorky ! He thinks you get hot if he bumps up against you on the lunch line!” The yellow-brown mane flared constantly across the faces of her companions.

Farrell shouted, “Lady Aiffe!” several times, but she did not turn until he tried calling her by her real name. Then she turned, frowned, hesitated, said something to her friends, and crossed the street as he pulled to the curb, blocking a driveway. Briseis whimpered impatiently, but he got out of the bus and stood waiting as the girl approached him.

“Hey,” she said, “The old Knight of Whatever. Ghosts and Dragons.” She might have been a little paler than the child who had changed herself into a bird; otherwise, she looked no different at all. Farrell said, “I heard you got sick after the Whalemas Tourney. Are you okay now?”

Aiffe looked briefly puzzled, then nodded. “I was sick. I’m fine now. I was really sick.” The recognition in her eyes went no further than his face; there was no indication that she connected him with any event beyond the Tourney. “I was pretty delirious,” she said. “I don’t really remember a whole lot.”

“Do you remember Nicholas Bonner?”

Her face went utterly blank, empty past pretense. She had never heard the name before. She said, “Actually, there’s a whole lot of people in the League I don’t know anymore. I’m not as much into that whole thing as I used to be.”

“Your father still is, though.”

She laughed, hugging her book bag and leaning against Madame Schumann-Heink. “Grownups have time for that stuff. They don’t have to do computer science homework and try out for plays. Hey, we’re putting on Arsenic and Old Lace , I’m going to be one of the old ladies.” She chattered on, while her friends fidgeted at the end of the block and Briseis yawned and sighed in the bus. Farrell interrupted her at last.

“I didn’t mean to make you late,” he said. “I just want to ask you one thing.” Aiffe waited, her smile only slightly wary. Farrell asked, “What did she say to you? In that room, putting your mind back together with everything else coming apart, what did she say?” He had meant to keep his voice conversational and unthreatening, but Aiffe took one small step backward. “Come on, you have to remember that much,” he coaxed her. “Even if you don’t remember how you got there, or what was going on, you have to remember being there with her, she must have talked to you. Did she say where she was going, what was happening to her? Will you tell me what she said, God damn you?”

There was a moment when he was absolutely certain that some part of her, some red-gold fleck in her eyes, understood perfectly what he was saying and sat back laughing at him, like Nicholas Bonner in the redwood grove . Then the same eyes were full of bewildered tears and she was lunging away down the street to her friends. Someone uniformed enough to be a security patrol was starting toward Farrell, and he swung back up into the bus and got himself and Briseis out of there. In his last sight of Aiffe, the other three girls were consoling her and hugging her; one was even trying to brush her hair.

The snake ring glimmered against the steering wheel as Madame Schumann-Heink approached the freeway. Briseis had her head out of the window, apparently watching sailboats on the Bay. Farrell said, “Pilot to navigator. South is Mexico, north is Canada. Let’s hear it.” Briseis’ nose and tail indicated the turn-off.