The Folk Of The Air Read online

  “Be damned,” he said softly. He parked the BSA near a Norton and told them to play nicely. Julie and he walked on toward the lights. She linked her arm in his, letting her fingers lie along the inside of his wrist.

  “Pick a name,” she said. La Volunté ended to the sound of laughter. There was a dark tent, floating at its base like a distant mountain.

  “Lester Young. No, Tom a’Bedlam.” She stopped walking and stared. “You know. With a host of furious fancies, whereof I am commander—”

  “Be serious,” she said with surprising fierceness. “Names mean something here, Joe. Pick a good name, quickly, I’ll tell you why later.”

  But the music had made him pleasantly frisky, rocking him gently in the sweet air. He said, “All right, Solomon Daisy. Malagigi the Dwarf Enchanter. Splendid name.” The consort began to play another Gervaise piece, a pavane, giving it the slow, gracious lilt that makes a pavane something more than procession. “How about John Amend-All? Big Jon and Sparkie? You could be Sparkie.” The music sounded no closer as they approached the pavilion in the meadow. An owl was overhead, moving like a great ray flying in the deep sea. Farrell put his arm around Julie’s shoulders and said, “Sorry. You choose a good name for me, please.”

  Before she could answer him, a plumed shadow stood up before them, as sudden as the owl. “Who goes?” It was a low voice, hardly louder than the little scream of steel on iron that accompanied it.

  Farrrell laughed in disbelief, but Julie stepped in front of him. “My lord Garth, it is Julie Tanikawa and a friend.” Her own voice was clear and buoyant, and close to singing. The sword whined back into its scabbard, and the sentinel came toward them, squinting through the darkness, his gait something between a mince and a prowl.

  “The Lady Murasaki?” His tone heaved itself up into Elizabethan heartiness. “Now in Jesu’s name, give you thrice good den, shield-may. We had not looked to see you soon at these our revels.”

  Julie dropped him a quick curtsy, a movement altogether marvelous and warning to Farrell. She said, “In truth, my lord, I’d no mind to come dancing this night, but it pleased my fancy to show my friend how we of the fellowship do disport ourselves at whiles.” She took hold of Farrell’s arm and drew him beside her.

  The sentinel bowed slightly to Farrell. He had a narrow, knuckly, intelligent face beneath a feathered cap, and he wore a stiff crewelworked doublet that, with its huge shoulders and waistless line, made him look a good deal like a jack of diamonds. The tips of his stringy mustache were each waxed and curled into a full circle, so that he seemed to have fixed a pair of steel-rimmed pince-nez upside down on his upper lip. It was the only thing about him that Farrell liked at all. He said, “I am called the Lord Seneschal Garth de Montfaucon.”

  Heeding Julie’s glance, Farrell groped randomly through a pale litter of paladins, wizards, and Canterbury pilgrims; then fell back on the Celtic twilight. “Good sir, there is a geas upon me. A taboo.” Garth nodded, looking nearly as offended by the footnote as Farrell could have wished. Farrell said carefully, “I am forbidden to reveal my name between moonrise and dawn, save to a king’s daughter. Pardon me, therefore, till we meet by daylight, if you will.” He thought it was a very good geas, considering the short notice.

  Beyond Garth de Montfaucon, other cloaked and kirtled figures were passing in and out of the dark pavilion’s shadow, or standing still in torchlight. Garth said slowly, “A king’s daughter.”

  “Aye, and a maiden.” What the hell, if you’re going to have a geas, have a geas.

  “Say you so?” Garth frowned down his nose, seemingly sighting myopically in on Farrell through the foolish mustache. Farrell said, “In sooth,” and Julie giggled. “And not until we two—we twain—have danced a galliard together.” Garth looked away to hail another arriving couple, and Julie drew Farrell quickly past him toward the trees and the music. Farrell could see the musicians now, four men and a woman standing together on a low wooden dais. The men all wore the ruffled white shirts and overstuffed breeches of Rembrandt burghers; but the woman, who tapped strongly with her fingers on a small drum, wore a plain, almost colorless gown that made her look like a chess queen. Farrell stood still to watch them playing the old music for dancers he could not see.

  “Be welcome, then.” The bleak little voice of the Lord Seneschal carried clearly after them from the meadow. “Dance well, Lady Murasaki, with your nameless follower.” Julie blew out her breath softly and showed her teeth.

  “His name is Darrell Sloat,” she said evenly. “He teaches remedial reading at Hiram Johnson Junior High School. I say it to myself whenever he manages to make me angry.”

  A huge man in Tudor dress, all crimson velvet, gold chains, and great slabs of pinkish-yellow jowl, pushed between them like a wave of meat, wheezing winy apologies, the basket hilt of his sword bruising Farrell’s ribs. Farrell said grandly, “Nay, doth he bug you, sweet chuck? I’fackins, I’ll sock him right in the eye. No, I’ll challenge him, by God, I’ll call him out.” He stopped, because Julie was gripping his wrist tightly, and her hand was cold.

  “Don’t even joke about that,” she said. “I’m serious, Joe, stay away from him.”

  The pavane came to a languishingly dissonant resolution, and Farrell saw the musicians bow, the men comic in their conga-drum pantaloons, the woman making a curtsy like a silk dress falling to the floor. He began to ask Julie why he should beware of Garth de Montfaucon; but then he said, “Oh my,” as they came around the pavilion and he saw the dancers.

  There were some forty or fifty of them—perhaps less, but they shone like more under the trees. The last flourish of the pavane had set their hands free to balance above them in the night, and the torchlight—Coleman lanterns hung from branches—made their rings and their jeweled gloves splash fire, scattering tiny green and violet and silver flames like largesse to the musicians. Farrell could not find any faces in that first wonder of brightness and velvet, cloaks and gold and brocade—only the beautiful clothes glittering in a great circle, moving as though they were inhabited, not by human heaviness, but by marshlights and the wind. The folk of the air, he thought. These are surely the folk of the air.

  “What is it?” Julie asked, and he realized that he had pulled away from her and taken a step forward. Ben was standing beyond the far side of the circle, half-hidden by the vast crimson Tudor. He wore a blue, full-sleeved tunic under a black mantle lined with white, and a helmet with a wild boar’s muzzle for a crest. Bronze ornaments glinted at his throat, a short axe in his wide copper belt. As Farrell stared, taking another step, Ben turned his scarred shield of a face and saw him, and did not know him.

  Chapter 8

  Farrell called and waved, but the harsh dark gaze passed over him without returning. A group of young girls, all clad in Disney-fairy gauze, bounded by, hand in hand. When Farrell could see across the clearing again, Ben was gone. The red Tudor stared back at him out of the faraway secrecy of an old bull.

  Julie said, “He doesn’t usually come to the dances.” Farrell spluttered at her. She said, “I didn’t know who he was. There are people here whose real names I haven’t learned in two years. They don’t tell anybody.”

  “What’s his play name, then?” He knew her answer before he heard it.

  “He calls himself Egil Eyvindsson.” The musicians began to play a coranto, and there was a stir of nervous, challenging laughter. Julie said, “He comes to the tilts, always, and I see him at the crafts fairs sometimes. Mostly he goes where there’s fighting.” She spoke slowly, watching his face. “He happens to be the best with weapons I’ve ever seen, your friend Ben. Broadsword, greatsword, maul—in the War of the Queen Mother’s Boots, they said it was like having five extra knights and a gorilla. He could be king any time he wanted to be.”

  “I have no doubt of it,” Farrell said. “None. I’m sure he could make Holy Roman Emperor if he’d just take the civil service exam. With his grades. Are you going to turn out to be crazy?”

&nbs
p; “Dance,” Julie said calmly; and without another word, she slipped off into the tootling rush of the coranto, dancing away with little sharp steps, springing sweetly from one foot to the other, knuckles on her hips and her head cocked sideways. Two couples hopped between them as Farrell stared after her, the men bowing courteously to him, making it a curve of the dance, and the women calling. “Welcome, Lady Murasaki!” Julie laughed back at them, greeting them by strange names.

  Where the noises are. The crumhorns pattered on the small moonlit breeze, and all around him, boots, sandals, and soft, loose slippers trod down the wiry grass, skipping and heeling through the same paces that the dancing queen of England had loved once. Scabbards clacked against belts, trailing gowns sighed in the leaves, small bells tingled at hems and wrists. People who bumped into Farrell said, “A thousand pardons, fair sir.” He could not find Ben anywhere, but he saw Julie sauntering back to him, walking the music like a cat on a fence, saying again, “Dance. Dance, Joe.”

  Beyond her Farrell saw the gristly face of Garth de Montfaucon watching him with dispassionate, almost scholarly loathing. Farrell made a reverence to Julie, pointing his toes out and sinking into a rocking bow, while his hands inscribed magicianly arabesques at his breast. Julie smiled, answering him with a graver reverence of her own, holding out her hands.

  He had never danced a coranto, but he had played many, and his feet always knew what his fingers knew; conversely, he could never dance anything that he could not play. The steps were those of a pavane, but a pavane created and performed by rabbits in moonlight instead of peacocks stalking, blue as salt on fire, along white walks under a Spanish noon. Farrell went hand in hand with Julie, copying her movements—the impatient little jump just before the beat, the pouncing advances and retreats, the eager, delicate landings. The music had thinned to a single crumhorn and the hoarse, scratchy drum. In the blowing kerosene light, Farrell saw the woman’s fingers flashing on the drum like rain.

  When Julie let go of his hand and they danced backward, facing each other, he had a moment to study the dancers nearest to them. Most were his age or younger; a surprising number were unusually fat—though their flowing clothes either minimized this or boldly enhanced it—and if none knew less about the coranto than he did, only a few seemed that much better at it or that concerned with precision. A youth in classical greenwood dress wound out of the ragged aisle, advancing toward the musicians, his skinny legs improvising side kicks and caprioles with a kitten’s skittery, implacable energy. An older woman, wearing a huge yellow Elizabethan farthingale that made her look as if she were smuggling washing machines, danced tirelessly by herself to sliding steps with a soft-shoe, keeping almost perfectly to the shrill triple time. Off under a redwood at the edge of the clearing, three other couples were footing a practiced pattern of their own, a twining figure in which the men took turns weaving back and forth between the women, each man miming plaintive, respectful urgency. When the coranto ended, they all bowed and kissed one another, formal as china figurines, random and sensual as bending grass. Farrell kissed Julie on the strength of it.

  The dancers did not applaud the musicians; rather, most of them turned and bowed toward the rude dais where the woman and the four clown-trousered men were already fallen into deep, slow reverences, the woman’s forehead almost touching her knee. Julie said, “The Lady Criseyde. She teaches the dances—everybody starts with her. Her husband’s the head of the Falconers’ Guild, Duke Frederik of Eastmarch.”

  “Frederik the Falconer.” Farrell had heard Crof Grant speak the name. He spied the white-haired man swaying dreamily near the dais, swathed from throat to shinbone in a voluminous saffron garment the size of a foresail. It was bunched into a great tumbling bundle at the waist and thrown over his left shoulder to fall down his back like a toga. There was a short blue jacket wound into it somewhere, and two or three forlorn suggestions of a white shirt struggling to surface. Farrell said vaguely, “Scots wha‘ hae.”

  The musicians were pooting experimentally again; the Lady Criseyde began softly to tap out the rhythm of another pavane. Julie put her arm under Farrell’s, and they took their places in a new line, standing between a Cavalier pair, all curls, feathers, laces, and rosettes, and a black couple in Saracen dress. Julie said, “You are attending at the King’s Birthday Revels of the League for Archaic Pleasures.”

  Farrell looked over at the black woman, who smiled back at him, her soft, serious face wickedly ambushed by dimples. She was wearing mostly opalescent veils and a wide woven belt, and her hair was braided and beaded and tipped with gold. With the casual shock of a dream, Farrell recognized her companion from the green convertible; he was the young man who had so airily warded off Madame Schumann-Heink with his broadsword. He winked at Farrell—a swift, glinting fingersnap of a wink—before turning away, stately and alone among Crusaders.

  The pavane was danced in the Spanish style, which had Farrell hopelessly adrift within a dozen bars. It was an unfamiliar air, a good deal livelier than the English paces he knew, and he wandered in and out of the measures in lonesome embarrassment. For all that, he went wistfully when Julie led him away to sit on the grass in the lee of the dark pavilion. “I was getting it,” he said. “It’s just been a while, is all.”

  Julie did not answer him, but watched the dances, one hand plucking absently at clover stems. Speaking quietly, without turning her head, she asked, “Have you chosen a name yet?”

  “Don’t need one. None but a king’s virgin daughter may know my name until sunrise.”

  She turned on him swiftly then, saying, “Don’t be a fool. I meant what I told you about names being important. Joe, pay attention for once.”

  Irritated himself, he answered, “Pay attention to what? Come on, Jewel, some fancy folk-dancing outfit calls itself the League for Artsy Amusements—”

  “Archaic Pleasures,” Julie said. “Incorporated, with fourth-class mailing privileges.” Her eyes were on the pavane again, and her fingers had never left their blind work in the cold grass. “And they aren’t folk dancers.”

  “Oh, right,” Farrell said. “They have wars over the queen’s garter belt. I forgot. What else do they do?”

  “It was the War of the Queen Mother’s Boots—and it was a very serious matter.” She began to laugh, leaning against him. “They stage tilts,” she said. “Tournaments. That’s what that helm was for, and the chain mail.”

  “You mean jousting?”

  Julie shook her head. “Not jousts. Jousts are on horseback, and it just gets too dangerous. But they have all the rest of it—sword fights, quarterstaff matches, shooting at the wand, even mêlées.” The torchlight turned the dancers and musicians to slippery bronze shadows; the darkness made momentary candles of kirtles and plumes. Julie went on, “It isn’t all fighting, like Hyperborea. Some of the men never fight at all—they join for the music or the dressing up, they become bards, they do research on heraldry, calligraphy, court procedure, even on the way people cooked and the games they played. But there wouldn’t be a League without the tilts.”

  Prowling gracefully by with a very young girl in a plain blue houppelande, Garth de Montfaucon looked over his shoulder at them. Farrell said, “Hyperborea?”

  “That’s the Sacramento chapter. There’s another one in Los Angeles, the Kingdom Under the Hill. We are the Kingdom of Huy Braseal.”

  She said the name with a slightly mocking flourish, but Farrell felt a sudden odd little shiver inside himself, a dainty tickle of ice under his skin. He had felt it earlier, in the moment when Garth’s sword had whimpered from its sheath. He asked, “Since when have you been mixed up with all this? How long have these people been around?”

  “Ten or twelve years. Huy Braseal, anyway—the others started up later.” Two huge Afghan hounds, one black, one golden, lolloped among the dancers, their grinning loutishness and primrose eyes somehow turning the pavane altogether into a tapestry fragment glowing far away. Julie said, “I’ve been involved for a cou
ple of years, on and off. Nancy got me into it, the Lady Criseyde. She’s in Graduate Admissions.”

  Farrell said slowly, “The armor on your bed, that was real. What about the swords and axes and stuff?”

  “Rattan, mostly. It’s like wicker, only heavier. A few people still use regular softwood, I think—pine and so on.”

  “Not old Sir Turkish Delight,” Farrell said. “The boy with the trick mustache. That was a realie he was waving around.”

  “Oh, that’s just Garth showing off,” she answered scornfully. “He always brings Joyeuse to the dances. They have very strict rules about all that. You’re not allowed to fight with anything that’ll take an edge, but it has to hit hard enough so that it would cut armor if it were sharp. The way it works out, the weapons aren’t quite real enough to kill you—just to break a hand or a rib now and then. It’s a touchy point with the Brotherhood of Swordsmiths.”

  “I’ll bet,” he said. “What a thing. Are you a brother swordsmith?”

  “No, I’m in the Artisans’ Fellowship. We’re the ones who make the clothes and the household banners, paint the shields, and whatever else people commission us to do. I don’t make armor anymore; I just did that when I began with the League.”

  The owl was back, moth-gray in the moonlight, wheeling and stooping above the pavane, calling thinly in what Farrell was sure was anger at finding its hunting grounds so utterly occupied. Julie pointed King Bohemond out to him—a stocky, balding, youngish man wearing a long purple tunic and cope, both garments cut and heavily embroidered in the Byzantine manner. He was standing with three other men—the red Tudor was one of them—under a tree just beyond the clearing. Farrell asked, “How do you get to be a king in Huy Braseal?”