The Folk Of The Air

Chapter 16

The war was not optional. Nearly every knight of the League, saving only the combat master John Erne and the King, was expected to take part in it, though the degree of a fighter’s activity was for him alone to choose. Farrell knew only that he belonged on Simon Widefarer’s side and that he would do something humane and encouraging on the home front. He asked Simon whether making hero sandwiches and teaming with Hamid ibn Shanfara to improvise morale-boosting songs for the troops entitled a man to noncombatant status. Simon guaranteed nothing, but recommended climbing a tree.

The rules of the war were simple and very few. The tangly thirteen-acre island in the middle of Lake Vallejo—a bay and a county away from Havelock—had been ceded annually to the League for the past several years, thanks to a combination of friends in moderate power and a lack of tourist interest in the poison-oak-ridden area. For a week preceding their dawn-to-dusk occupancy, the defending side was permitted to swarm over the island, constructing a web of plywood barbicans and outworks, as well as varyingly symbolic entrenchments, deadfalls, and mantraps, all centering on a primitive fortress, little more than a stockade atop a mound of earth. It was this castle that Garth de Montfaucon’s forces would have to take to win the war.

Combat was conducted as in any tourney, with the outcome being determined largely by honor and eight floating referees, four from each side. In the one departure from ordinary League procedures, each party was allowed the use of a weapon customarily forbidden. Simon Widefarer chose the longbow, Garth the morgenstern. In practice, as William the Dubious pointed out, it always came down to swords; but Simon’s choice committed the invaders to helmets and serious body armor, despite the special blunted arrows. “That adds up fast, on a hot day. They never write about it, but plain exhaustion must have accounted for as many armored knights as anything else, in the old wars. Look for them to start dropping around two o’clock, three maybe.”

“Can we hold them off that long?”

William beamed a bit muzzily. They had been helping to work on the wooden castle all afternoon, aided by a siegeworthy stock of Mexican beer. “Easiest part of it. The thing is, Joe, the defenders always have the edge. There are only three good places to land on this whole island—there used to be more, but Garth spent all week one year bringing in these huge rocks, and he dropped them around so they ripped the bottom out of anything that tried to beach. It’ll take them till noon just to get a foothold, and they’ll lose a lot of men doing it. They’ve only got till sundown, and we can keep them away from the castle till late afternoon sometime, with any luck at all.”

“Nice house odds,” Farrell said. He thought of adding, except for Aiffe, but instead he asked, “You’re really looking forward to this, aren’t you?”

William the Dubious nodded earnestly. “This will be my fifth. I just think it’s a great outlet for so much bad stuff—all your aggressions, your violence, phony behavior, the whole thing of choosing sides, winning. I think all wars will have to be like that pretty soon, like ours. Nobody can afford the real ones anymore, but people still have to have them.” He caught himself, laughed self-consciously and added, “Okay, men have to have them. See, I’m trained.”

On the evening before the war, Farrell went with Hamid to a meeting at William’s house to discuss plans for the War of the Witch, as it was already being called. Simon Widefarer and most of his strongest fighters were there, arguing like football fans about tourneys past and storied feats of arms in shattering mêlées; and, like connoisseurs of rugs or high fashion, about techniques of shield work and innovations in longaxe combat. There was mulled wine and homebrewed mead, and conversation slipped back and forth across the border between daily speech and the silly, haunting Ivanhoe language.

Farrell fell asleep and was nudged awake by Hamid when the gathering broke up. Drowsily he asked, “How’d it come out? Do we have a game plan?”

“Best game plan in the world,” Hamid said. “Pound ‘em on the head, stay out of the poison oak, and run like hell when Aiffe shows up. One slick game plan.”

Farrell had come to the meeting in League dress—tights, tunic and a laced vest that Julie had made for him—like everyone else except Hamid, who had arrived directly from his post office job, wearing tan slacks, a white short-sleeved shirt, and—in spite of the heat—a narrow red tie, elegant as a serpent. Passers-by turned completely around to stare at them as they walked down through the sweetly smothering night. Hamid said, “I got to stop drinking that damn mead of William’s. You could fly model airplanes on it.”

“I understand he’s catering the war,” Farrell said. “You still think Aiffe’s going to show? Simon kept swearing she’d promised the Nine Dukes or somebody—”

“Man, I know she is!” Hamid stopped walking. “Simon was just trying to keep their minds off that battle roster Garth sent over. We got them outnumbered damn near two to one. You think old Garth didn’t notice? You think he’d ever let the odds stack up like that if he didn’t have a little game plan of his own?” His voice rose and softened into the singing mumble of the St. Whale saga. “Oh, it is going to be a one-woman extravaganza, live from Las Vegas, and when it’s over there won’t be any more wondering, any uncertainty about just who is the star around this League. And there is to be a death.”

They were two blocks further along before Farrell could believe Hamid’s last words enough to repeat them. Hamid blinked. “Did I say that? I told you, I have got to lay off the mead—it throws me right into my bard routine, and I don’t even notice.” He was silent for another block, and then he said quietly, “No, that’s not true. It just happens like that once in a while, with bards.”

“A death,” Farrell said. “Whose death? How?”

But Hamid walked on, striding out faster than Farrell had ever seen him, making the red tie lick backwards over his shoulder. “The voice just came out with it, it does that. Pay it no mind.”

He did not speak again until they were nearing the Parnell corner where Farrell would turn off toward Julie’s house. Then he said thoughtfully, “Word has it that a certain mutual royal friend is no longer on the street. Glad to hear it,” but there was a questioning tilt at the end.

Farrell said, “He’s in the hospital, getting over malnutrition, kidney trouble, a spot of anemia, and a couple of those things you get from living out of dumpsters. Also, he’s way past time for his regular dental checkup, and he’s under what they call observation because he has real trouble remembering who and when he is. But he’s doing fine.”

“Well, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth about him,” Hamid said. “I’ll be honest, I had my doubts as to how much you could take in.” He cut short Farrell’s indignant response. “Yeah, I know what you and I saw Aiffe do, but you got to understand, I have also seen more than a hundred intelligent people steadily denying something she pulled off right in front of their eyes. Unmaking it, you hear what I’m saying? Changing him, changing Micah, to fit the story, I saw them doing it. Man, he helped found and organize this whole damn League, and two weeks, three weeks, he was just another crazy black man, gone AWOL, gone native, the way they got this unfortunate tendency to do.” His voice was shaking as badly as the hand that gripped Farrell’s forearm, the enviable, expected grace of being in sudden shreds. “You ever want to see the real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comfort, their beliefs. That’s where it is.”

Farrell asked, “Why did you stay in the League?”

Hamid’s control was already reasserting itself when he answered. “They needed a chronicler, and I needed something to chronicle. I had my own comfort to look after.”

At the corner, he bade Farrell an abrupt good night, turned away, hesitated, and then added, “You know, another reason I had some trouble talking about Micah—I guess you know Julie and he were sort of an item when what happened happened.” Farrell nodded. Hamid said, “I wouldn’t take it to heart. But I’d say they do have a certain amount of unfinished business.”

“It’s their business,” Farrell said. “That voice of yours, on the other hand, that death tomorrow, I think that’s our business. I think we should pay attention.”

Hamid snorted. “That voice’ll say anything, it doesn’t know shit.” But his eyes were not mocking when he patted Farrell’s shoulder. “Well, we’ll pay attention, whatever we can do. That’s the thing with the damn bardic voice, it never comes with instructions you can read. Worse than useless. See you on the island.”

Julie was sleeping soundly when Farrell let himself in, and he set her alarm clock for a three o’clock summons, sourly certain that she had spent the evening in Micah Willows’ hospital room. But when he rose from the bed, she turned over, swiftly wide awake, reaching up for him. “Have a good time,” she said. “When in doubt, just surrender. I’ll ransom you.”

Farrell kissed her, saying, “I know it’s dumb, boys playing war games. I just want to see what it’s like one time.”

Julie said, “Don’t apologize, for God’s sake. Just remember, not everyone there will be playing. Keep your head down.”

She was asleep again when the armored men knocked at the door. Farrell opened it and saw William the Dubious and two others, all three cloaked from throat to ankle, but ringing softly when they moved. A van, bigger and newer than his own, stood twitching in the driveway. Farrell ducked back into the house, grabbed his lute and the mail shirt that Julie had insisted he take with him, and went outside.

Ben was sitting in the van, dressed in full Viking battle gear, all studded leather and painted steel, with heavy arm rings and a bear-claw necklace. Only the belt-axe and horned helmet were familiar to Farrell. He was badly frightened for a moment, unsure of whom he was facing; but then Ben grinned at him and made a uniquely obscene gesture they had both learned from a Sicilian classmate, and Farrell demanded, “What the hell are you doing here? You said you didn’t go to the wars anymore.”

“Don’t yell,” Ben said placidly. “People are sleeping. A little consideration here.”

“You had all these papers to grade. You made such a thing out of it—a zillion papers, no time, no time, be working when you get back from the playground, Joe. Embarrassed the hell out of me for even asking you—”

“Grading papers is boring. Wars are fun. Get in, we’ve got two other knights to pick up.”

Farrell lurched into the seat beside him, asking, “Does Simon know? He was throwing a major hissy last night because you weren’t coming. Does Sia know?”

Ben said, “Sia sent me to keep you out of mischief. Okay now? Shut up and put that shirt on, you’ll need it.”

The drive to Lake Vallejo took a little more than an hour, and the sky was thinning when they parked the van near a concrete-block lavatory and walked the rest of the way down to the lakeshore. Farrell saw a dozen other cars and pickups parked among the cottonwoods and a rowboat plying toward the island, bearing four knights, their cloaks flaring in the dawn wind and their armor the color of the lake. A golden banner with two black swans on it flapped stiffly above them.

It was no great distance to the island, but the boat went back and forth three times before it came the turn of Farrell, Ben, William, and their companions. As a result, they arrived at the plywood fortress just as Simon Widefarer was ending a passionate and furious harangue of encouragement to his drowsy, dispirited-looking troops. He broke it off and led the cheering as Ben, with Farrell following, slipped hastily into the ranks of variously caped and armored men grouped around their household banners. Farrell joined Hamid under the blazon of one Mathgamhain of Cliodhna, but Simon Widefarer took advantage of his position as captain to call Ben personally to his side. He went with odd reluctance, looking back at Farrell to say, like Julie, “Be careful. You hear me, Joe? Be really careful.”

Mathgamhain of Cliodhna was well pleased to have both Farrell and Hamid ibn Shanfara in his service. “No lord of Ireland would go to the fighting without his bard and his harper, surely,” he said. “And can you play The Silkies in the Green Sea for us?”

“We can fake it,” Hamid said. Simon Widefarer said loudly, “Nor is there need for any but a dunghilly poltroon to fear the girl. Twice over, both as witch and woman, is she forbidden to set foot on this island today, and it is known to every man that her power may not cross the water. Banish her from your fears, therefore, and attune your souls to victory. For Bohemond and St. Whale!”

“That’s running water,” Farrell said softly, “not a lake,” and Hamid nodded. The last shout drew a sharp answering cheer from the knights—though not as triumphant a one as the sight of Ben had raised—and they wandered off to their assigned positions with some gaiety and swash. The sun was rising now, making their armor seem to slide like water, running crimson, ebbing into silver, eddying black. Three of the men were harmonizing zestfully on The Agincourt Carol, their strong, rough voices still clear to Farrell after they had disappeared among the alder bushes.

The first attackers did not appear on the opposite shore until the sun was well up. Farrell sat in a tree and watched the enemy knights climbing into half a dozen rowboats and being pushed off toward the island by their barelegged squires. The sunlight on their plumes and visors made them into faceless, fire-headed beings—torch-arrows at the string. Farrell called to Hamid waiting below, “Twenty-six, I make it,” and Hamid turned away to report the count of Mathgamhain’s lieutenant.

The boats angled away from each other, two aiming for each of the accessible landings. Farrell had meant to begin staying out of the way, as he felt became an unarmed musician, at the first sight of Garth’s forces; but he retreated only a little way as the boats drew in, taking shelter behind the first and slightest barbican, no more than a shoulderhigh plywood windbreak tacked hurriedly across a couple of trees. Three knights already crouched there, their helmets beside them on the ground, and each man held a bow. Farrell noticed that two of the bows were wooden, expertly crafted, while the other was of fiberglass, with a sighting device and a rest for the arrow. But it was a knight with a wooden bow who was chewing bubble gum.

Under their motionless gaze, two boatloads of the raiders glided through the gap in Garth’s barrier reef to beach among vines. Farrell heard the oarlocks clanking and the boats’ bottoms grinding thickly on the shore. The knights began to scramble out, moving awkwardly, shields held high before them. Several had their swords out as well, and most carried flail-crowned maces—the morgensterns—tucked into their belts, the studded heads dangling from chains and wire cables. The heads were supposed to be built up around tennis balls, reinforced with cloth, rubber, and leather; but to Farrell’s eyes, they swung a good bit more like icy snowballs with rocks in them. He recognized the foxy brightness of their leader, Brian des Rêves, Garth’s closest crony, and heard his soft commands as the detachment pushed forward. The three waiting men chose arrows from their quivers.

Even before they stood up together, fitting arrows and firing over the barricade almost in one motion, Brian—perhaps warned by the rattle of the quivers—had wheeled away, shouting to his knights to scatter, to get to the sides. The blunted arrows clacked off the wooden shields, bonked when they found armor. Farrell would have expected at least five official casualties among the nine invaders, but only one man fell, struck full in—and presumably through—his gorget, and again in the side as he went down. Another knight turned back to help him, was shot in the sword arm, and lunged into the bushes, out of range. The others had vanished; Farrell could hear them shoving their armor through the wiry scrub, moving to outflank the barbican. The defending knights put down their bows and drew their rattan swords, though the undergrowth barely gave them room even to stand on guard. Farrell began thoughtfully to fall back, thinking that Lord Mathgamhain might like to hear The Silkies in the Green Sea again.

A thin young man wearing a black shirt and black trousers pushed past him toward the knight who still lay sprawled before the barbican. He carried a clipboard of yellow paper and called loudly as he went, “Ramon of Navarra, arm wound—the MacRae, arm and leg—Olivier le Setois, arm wound—Sforza of Lombardy, slain.” The knight sat up, then got to his feet. The man in black said, “Go on over to Glendower’s Oak, you know where that is? They’ve got beer and sandwiches—check yourself off the big roster, first thing.” He turned briskly back toward the sudden clatter of swords and garbage-can racket of whirling flails that had erupted behind the barrier. Farrell, easing discreetly away into the deeper woods, got a glimpse of two defending knights standing back to back, each one assailed by at least two men. Sforza of Lombardy marched by, slain in combat and heading for neutral territory until the end of the war. He was whistling softly and snapping his fingers.

Behind Farrell, Hamid clucked his tongue disapprovingly. “Now you see, that man is not serious. The serious ones, they lie right where they fall, all day.”

Battle had apparently broken out on all three beachheads. Knights of Simon Widefarer’s army went leaping past Farrell, waving their swords and tangling their cloaks in the shrubbery, all hurrying to reinforce the besieged outworks. Simon’s lone semblance of a campaign plan involved the archers’ keeping off the landing parties for as long as possible, and then giving ground slowly, digging in at every fortification, until it came time for the last stand in the castle and the hope of sundown.

Hamid ibn Shanfara strode the island tirelessly in his white robes and turban, wailing Moorish and Celtic battle songs and constantly inventing immediate rhymed accounts of events that were still going on as he chanted them. Farrell stayed closer to Mathgamhain of Cliodhna, dutifully cheering the Irish lord into every encounter, bearing messages for him and his household, and casting increasingly wistful glances at the refreshment table each time he was swept past it, That’s where I make my stand, boy. Bury me where the braunschweiger’ll wave over my grave.

It was like being at a League tourney that went on forever, without dancing or jugglers. In a certain fashion, matters obeyed the vague rhythms of a real campaign, lurching back and forth between the various outworks and the shore, but continually breaking off for innumerable ritualized and irrelevant personal combats. All action halted in any quarter when it was shouted that Brian des Rêves was blade to blade with Olaf Holmquist, or that Raoul of Carcassonne and the Ronin Benkei, each with a sword in one hand and a cudgel in the other, were holding six knights something more than at bay in a poison-oak ravine. The rest of it was dust, prickly sweat, squatting boredom, aimless running and ducking into bushes, occasional flurries of pushing and falling down, the bustling of the black-clad referees, and eternally the idiot yells of “Yield thee, recreant!” and “To me! To me! House of the Bear, here to me!” Garth’s tactics continued to be no more imaginative than Simon Widefarer’s, but it was obvious that no one truly cared which side gained or lost ground—the fighting was all, and Farrell wondered that he should ever have expected it to be any other way.

There was no sign or sense of Aiffe, nor of Nicholas Bonner, and Farrell found himself almost disappointed. Ben was hardly more visible than they, for all his fearsome reputation. Farrell glimpsed him now and then, at a distance, on the trailing edge of some flanking attack or mop-up maneuver; but so far he figured nowhere in Hamid’s evolving chronicle of the War of the Witch. Mathgamhain fell at midafternoon, not in battle, but of what appeared to be acute indigestion, and he was followed in quick order by four similar cases and three of sunstroke. Farrell remembered William the Dubious’ prediction and would have thought little more of this, but then the injured started coming in. Two had apparently fallen into deep pits that opened beneath their feet; three others had been knocked half-senseless by branches falling from great redwoods. Hamid, skillfully bandaging a victim, looked across him at Farrell and said, “Methinks, man.”

“Me, too,” Farrell said. But he was hot and grubby and unable at present to think seriously about anything but beer. While Mathgamhain’s men were choosing a new captain from among themselves, he wandered away among the trees until he came to a clear-trodden path that he thought led to Glendower’s Oak, where the slain and the captive alike went, and where there might be something on hand other than William’s stickily dangerous mead. The woods seemed thicker and wilder here, laced with deep, luminous alleys, and the air tasted of old silence. Farrell began to play softly as he walked—a Latin drinking song that Chaucer had known—and presently paused to retune the lute to a more suitable mode. But for that halt, he might not have heard Aiffe’s voice directly ahead of him nor had time to lie down by the path among tree roots and long grass. He could not see her, because his cheek was tucked hard against spongy bark and his eyes were shut. He knew beyond the absurdity of it that she would find him if he opened his eyes.

“Nay, this is mine,” she was saying, “this is my triumph and no other’s. But for the piffling form of it, I’d face them singlehanded, with no knights at my back, no father to serve as my front and weary me with counsel. And no dorky Nicholas Bonner, neither, to tell me what I may and mustn’t do. Just me, just Aiffe—gods, what a wonder.” Her fierce snicker actually resounded in the lute, and Farrell quickly smothered its tiny answer against his belly.

Silken old laughter responded to hers just as the lute had done. “What, no sweet Nicholas Bonner, then, to nourish your glory? A summer’s apprenticeship, and you’ll pension me off and make your way alone? Greedy, thankless child, you wound my heart.”

“I was never your stupid apprentice,” she answered angrily. “You’re in this world because of my power, but you’ve got none of your own—I know that for sure, anyway. And yeah, I do think I’ve learned just about all you’ve got to teach me, what do you think about that?” The voices had stopped approaching, and Farrell opened one eye a little way.

She was standing no more than fifty feet from him, facing Nicholas Bonner on the path. They were dressed alike as squires in boots, hose, and rather faded doublets, though Aiffe’s hair was hidden by a hooded cape, while Nicholas Bonner wore only an owl’s feather in his melon-yellow mane. He said, indulgently malicious, “And that little matter of the old woman who left you drooling in the Street? You’d handle her without me?”

Aiffe snorted, derisive and uncomfortable at once. “Maybe yes, maybe no. She’s your old woman, your big thing, you handle her. I’ve got no problem with her, except that she’s too strong. I don’t like people to be that strong.”

Nicholas Bonner’s voice was as soothing as sunlit mist. “Well, we’re here to learn how strong you are, my own sweeting. This toy war of theirs is your tiltyard, your testing ground—let’s see what you can do, then. The small plagues were an exercise; you could have done those in your sleep—in fact, you have.” He was stroking her, slipping his hands under the cape. “Time now for something a bit more demanding.”

Aiffe sighed and giggled, letting the cape fall from her. “Why do you always want to do this? You don’t get anything out of it; you think I don’t know? Why do you want it?”

Nicholas Bonner answered her honestly and with something close to dignity. “Dear love, I enjoy exactly what you enjoy, and that is the sensuality of power. There is no other pleasure I can take, even if I would. Yet each time we couple, you and I, something moves, something is born, as it is with real people. I am well content.” When he laid her down on the cape, her small, round breasts butted at him like cats.

Farrell began to crawl slowly backward, away from the path, but he had covered only a few yards when a heavy body pinioned his own, kneeing the breath out of him, and a hand went over his mouth. Ben whispered, “Don’t move.” Farrell squirmed his head to the side and saw him, face dark with dirty sweat, helmet askew and one of the horns badly chipped. Aiffe was chanting, the cold words whining out of her in the same rhythm with which Nicholas Bonner entered. Farrell watched them, rapt and ashamed, until Ben nudged him and they scrabbled off into comforting brambles. When Farrell looked back, he thought the air was shivering and sliding where Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner lay, like the air over the classroom radiator, that first school winter. Thought you were going blind at the age of seven.

“How did they get here?” he asked. “Simon’s had people patrolling the shore all day.”

Ben shook his head, immediately professorial, even wearing bear claws. “Simon’s been watching the only three places where a rowboat can beach. That’s not patrolling. Patrolling is when you keep an eye out for things like kayaks. They just slipped in from the Marin County side, easy as you please. Who needs magic?”

The leaves whirred softly overhead, like bicycle pedals, as they made their way back across the island. A Cooper’s hawk ripped down through the slanting light, striking for something almost at their feet, then flapped up into an ash tree, where it sat panting hard and staring at them furiously. Farrell said, “That’s not just your garden-variety quickie going on back there. That is machinery.”

“Tantric sorcery. Sex magic. Really effective if you know what you’re doing, dynamite if it gets loose. Sort of like Leg-O’s—you can make all kinds of really unpleasant stuff with it. Sia said they’d be using that.”

“What else did she tell you?”

Ben shrugged, smiling wearily. “Hard to remember. I mean, she woke me up, dumped me out of bed, damn near dressed me, and shoved me into that van. She kept saying something terrible was going to happen, and I was to stay with you all day. And a pain in the ass it has been, I may add, trying to fight and watch over you at the same time. I haven’t been doing either one very well.”

Their voices sounded fragile and very far away to Farrell—spider-ghosts scurrying hand over hand up the dusty pillars of light. He told Ben about Hamid’s warning and the circumstances of it. “Is that what Sia was talking about? Look, just tell me.”

Ben did not answer for a while, long enough for Farrell to become aware that Julie’s mail shirt had chafed several raw places on his neck and shoulders. Ben said at last, “She’s not always right, you know. And sometimes when she is right, it’s not in any way you could have imagined. Who knows what Sia means by death?”

The first sending exploded into being as they were informing Simon Widefarer that Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner were on the island. It looked like a raw, bloody stomach with a crocodile’s head, and it flew at them on wings edged with tiny mouths. Ben, Farrell, and Simon screamed and fell to the ground, and the creature flashed stinking over them; wheeling back for another go, making the sound of sucking mud. It had ridiculously bright blue eyes.

Half of Simon’s forces had been drawn into the plywood castle by now; the remainder—Hamid among them—were either off scouting, skirmishing, or helping to shore up the fortress’s rickety outer walls, as Farrell and Ben had found Simon doing. The structure was actually a good deal more solid than it looked, a fact proved conclusively by the time the second and third monster—one half-toad, half-gamecock, the other something like a pulpy Nutcracker Suite mushroom with yellow human teeth and a snake’s tongue—were streaking and circling low above the castle. At that point, so many yelling knights of the League had jammed through the entranceway and the two sally-ports that the entire castle should have been as flat as a split milk carton; but the walls remained upright, conveniently for the sendings, who perched on them. More and more came banging into being: goat-legged viscera, fanged cacti, huge, houndfaced slugs, creatures like stuffed toys oozing sewage, creatures like tall skeletal birds with fire pulsing between their ribs. Without exception, they smelled of carnivores’ excrement; and they kept coming, inexhaustible nightmare hybrids, chattering like parakeets, snuffling like bears. They dive-bombed, those who fled; they swooped low to snap and jeer at hysterical knights rolling on the ground; they overran the red sundown, leaving just enough daylight to see them by. Aiffe’s children, Farrell thought, and thought that he laughed into the trampled brown grass.

Beside him, Ben grunted, “Fuck this,” and stood up, brushing sendings away from him like gnats. “Absolutely harmless,” he announced loudly. “Low-budget special effects, might as well be afraid of a slide show. Let’s get on with the war.” He walked briskly toward the castle, picking up a hammer and a handful of nails to work on the weakened frame. Farrell followed, shoving after him through hot clouds of hovering phantasms. He always swore that one of them lit on his shoulder for a moment, and that the stench lingered in the tunic ever afterward. He never wore the tunic again and finally burned it one night, years later, when he was drunk.

“She’s very good,” Ben said quietly. “If he hadn’t been pushing her a bit too hard, we’d have been in big trouble.”

“Those things aren’t real,” Farrell offered cautiously. Ben shook his head irritably, hammering in a corner support. “Not quite, not yet. They will be. Another month, another week. The least little bit overtrained, that’s all,” He might have been talking about a distance runner. “I certainly wonder what she’ll try now.”

The sendings kept at it a while longer, increasingly petulant rather than menacing, badgering Simon’s knights for attention as the men returned to the castle in shaky, shamefaced twos and threes. A veil was thickening between them and the day they had raided; and by the time Hamid ibn Shanfara drifted in, they had been reduced almost to misshapen pigeons cadging handouts around park benches. Abruptly they twitched out of existence all at once, as if a single switch had shut them down. The late light came back, turning shadows green and gold, showing a good hour yet to sunset. Ben said again, “Now what?”

“Ah, as to that,” Hamid murmured in his legend-voice. “As to that, perhaps someone espied two handsome children in the wood, not twenty minutes since, and perhaps one said to t’other, ‘Nay, but you’ll not do this thing, I forbid it, so.’ And meseems the little girl gave him the lie straight away, saying for answer, ‘Forbid yourself, turkey. This shit is boring, and I am about to lose the damn war, messing around like this and the sun going down. Behold and stand back, for I will get myself some real help right now.’ But t’other was wondrous wroth, and says he, ‘For your life, you dare not! This is nothing for you, this is more than you can yet hold, on my word, sweet sister, on my word.’ And it might be she laughed at him, and perhaps someone heard her say then, ‘You have no word, and I told you when I summoned you first that I can handle anything I can call. And so I can, Jack, with or without you, I got it down!’ And it is said that he railed further at her folly, but perhaps not. A bard must say only what he knows.” He bowed slightly to Ben and Farrell and began rewinding his turban, amazingly immaculate.

Simon Widefarer was inside the plywood castle, spacing his men thinly along the walls to meet the sunset attack. Farrell was startled to realize how greatly their numbers had been reduced; between losses in battle and a dozen suspicious injuries, Simon was captain only of some sixteen exhausted knights besides himself. At first, he would not part with even one when Ben and Farrell repeated Hamid’s tale to him and urged a scouting expedition. “Not if she were coming down on us with all of Charlemagne’s paladins. What use is the knowledge now?” But Ben pressed the need fiercely, and Simon finally yielded, saying, “Let him go then—” He pointed to Farrell. “—and him.” He indicated the Scots laird Crof Grant, plaided to the eyebrows and topped off by a bonnet like a Christmas fruitcake, sagging with red and green clan badges, erupting with plumes enough to reconstruct the whole ostrich. Simon said, “I cannot spare Egil Eyvindsson from the defense, but two such will leave us little weaker.” Farrell felt as if he had once again been chosen last at stickball.

Skulking through the brush with Crof Grant was a reasonably similar experience to the time Farrell had tried to smuggle a pool table out of a fourth-floor walk-up at midnight. In the first place, Grant’s costume refused entirely to skulk, but caught on anything that made a noise, including Farrell; in the second, the man himself never ceased to prattle, in a constant warm spatter of glottals and occlusives, of the countless Sassenach rogues fallen that day to his trusty claymore. Hushing him did no good at all, since he was talking louder than Farrell dared raise his own voice. He was in the middle of a singlehanded stand against three foes armed with morgensterns, armored in crushing youth—“Losh, laddie, gin ye add their years thegither, ye’d hae no mair than my ain”—when they came into a clearing and saw Garth’s men waiting silently for them.

To do Crof Grant justice, he said only, “Hoot-toot,” before he started running. Farrell lingered for a deadly instant, not out of surprise or paralysis, but because of the five men grouped close behind Aiffe where she stood with her father. At first glance there was little to tell them from the rest of Garth’s tattered forces, grim alike with weariness; but Farrell had seen the yellow-eyed man in Sia’s house, and he had understood Aiffe’s challenge to Nicholas Bonner. Oh, my lord, she does have it down. Then Aiffe saw him and laughed and pointed, and one of the strange knights bent a bow at him so fast that he never saw it happen. The arrow sighed in his left ear, sinking itself out of sight in a juniper bush.

Farrell was running by then, half-crouched, hands guarding his face, struggling through blackberry, hemlock, and wild lilac, falling once and having to make sure that the lute was all right, and hearing himself making small noises like a garden hose or a steam radiator that has not been quite shut off. Away to one side, there was an immense crashing and stumbling that must surely be Crof Grant in flight, while behind him he heard only Aiffe’s whooping, shuddering laughter. But he knew who was pursuing him as clearly as he had suddenly known who they were: the real thing, genuine gunslingers out of the genuine Middle Ages, out of the Crusades, the Spanish Netherlands, the Wars of the Roses. Unpretentious, unwashed, unmerciful—the real thing, ready for bear. Lady Kannon, pity now. At that point, he dodged around one tree cheek-first into another and spun back to the first tree, slipping down against it, still reaching to shield the lute.

He lost color for a little while. When he could stand, three gray people were almost on him. The one closest might have been a pilgrim turned mercenary or a Norman invader of Sicily. Under a steel cap, he had a square, windburned face with flat cheekbones and tufty eyebrows, and his look was so peaceful and humorous as to be called insane. Farrell picked up a dead branch, watching with numb, patient curiosity as the man came on, noting equally the slight bend of the knee, the seemingly loose grip on the sword, and the flakes of dandruff in the pale eyebrows and mustache. The sword had a raw, winking notch near the tip, and the unbound pommel looked like an old brass doorknob. Farrell wondered whether the light reflected into his own face came from the setting sun of Avicenna or Palestine.

He held up his branch as the sword started back. It moved unnaturally slowly, the knight’s lips wrinkling with the same deliberation, his body setting itself for a sidearm blow. Then Crof Grant was trundling between them, grappling fearlessly for the sword and rumbling out, “Fye na, haud ye’er brand for sair shame. Tis a naked museecian, man—would ye harm a sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous minstrel?” The dreadful bonnet was gone, and his white hair kept falling into his eyes. The knight growled very softly and stepped away from him, moving up on Farrell from another angle. Grant was after him again, partially interposing his slow, shrouded body, “Nay, I say ye shanna‘! I say haud! Dinna ye ken League rules, man?”

The sword melted into the side of his throat, and he slapped vaguely at the wound before he stumbled down. Color came back with his blood.

Farrell never remembered how he reached the castle; only that he was not followed, and that he was crying when he got there. Ben held him on his feet and almost literally translated his near-hysterical report to Simon Widefarer, but no one else, except Hamid, seemed to take any of it seriously. He was reassured on all sides that Crof Grant could not possibly be really dead, that metal swords were never allowed in League combat, and that neither captain would even consider enlisting new fighters, once a war was under way. As for Aiffe’s monstrous sendings, the minority willing to discuss them at all favored mass hallucinations brought on by uniform minor sunstrokes, such as had been happening all afternoon. Meanwhile there was a last stand to prepare for, and a serious need of heartening music. Hamid looked down at him from a teetery catwalk, saying nothing.

The attack came no more than twenty minutes before sunset. There was no attempt at surprise; rather, the surviving knights of Garth de Montfaucon’s party—still fewer than Simon’s forces, and looking even more spent—approached the castle boldly, stepping with a slow, menacing rhythm and chanting grim burdens to keep time. Garth himself swaggered in the lead, but Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner walked unobtrusively to one side in their anonymous squires’ dress, followed by the five men she had summoned to her. On the catwalk, Farrell said to Hamid, “That’s the one. Second on the left, the short guy.” He thought that Aiffe looked anxious and subdued. Hamid said without expression, “I don’t want him to be dead. I don’t want to predict anyone’s death.”

“He’s dead, all right,” Farrell said.

Garth drew his troops up before the outer wall and stood forward, calling, “Now stand well away, of your kindness, for we’d see none injured when the walls come down.” Farrell knew that a battering-ram entry was as much a tradition of League wars as ransoms and victory feasts, but no ram was visible among the attackers. Nevertheless, there were knights on the wall who began to back away.

“Steady all,” Simon shouted, “Give them no heed, but look to your bowstrings.”

Aiffe kissed both of her hands loudly and blew the kisses toward the castle, spreading her arms to wave them on their way. The inner and outer gates fell down flat, and Garth’s men swarmed in through the rising dust.

Simon Widefarer and his archers fired frantically into the first rush, dropping a few as they scrambled over the gates. After that there was no free play, even for the morgensterns, and no room for referees. The castle seethed and rocked like a subway car at rush hour; fighting knights were hurled apart, unable to find their combat again, or stumbled together straight through someone else’s mêlée, and were cut down by their comrades, as likely as not. For those who fell, there was a very real danger of being badly trampled, and Farrell and Hamid hauled several such as far out of range as they could. They were huddled in a rear corner, Farrell curled protectively around the lute, Hamid jauntily crosslegged, still taking notes aloud. The dust went up elegantly, orange and gray, poising just over the scene like the fighter’s breath.

“Here they are,” Hamid said softly, and Farrell looked up to see Aiffe’s five summonings passing through the ragged gateways, three abreast, two following singly, moving into the battle as delicately as cats stalking a birdbath. Farrell was fascinated to see how much like any costumed bank managers they looked, even knowing what he knew. Hamid said, “All more or less from the same time period. I make it one Norman, one Venetian free-lance, two early Crusaders, and I don’t know what your boy there is, except nasty.” They both stood up as he want on musing. “Wonder how she handled the shock factor. They look pretty cool, considering they surely had other plans for the afternoon.”

At the top of his lungs, Farrell shouted the first word that came to him. “Realies!” Hamid burst out laughing, but no one else paid the least attention. Farrell yelled, “Real swords, ringers, look out, they’ve got real swords!” The five men spread out, choosing their targets. The Venetian went for Simon Widefarer, and the one who had killed Crof Grant came straight toward Farrell and Hamid.

Hamid said, “Some day we got to talk about whether it was really necessary for you to do that.” The Norman caught William the Dubious with a side cut that doubled him over, then aimed a finishing blow meant to shatter his helmet. The man who had killed Crof Grant blocked Farrell’s view. He looked happy and zestful, as if he were meeting dear friends at the airport.

As the sword began to come up, Hamid chanted loudly, “Hate to talk about your mama, she’s a good old soul,” and danced away to Farrell’s left. The sword flickered involuntarily to follow him, and Farrell shoved the lute into the man’s face, knocking the steel cap sideways. Everything in him screamed against the idea of using the instrument as a weapon; but he thought about vain, rumbling, ridiculous Crof Grant trying to protect him, and he hit his killer in the head with the lute as hard as he could. The beautiful elliptical back caved in as the man wandered to his knees. Farrell hit the man a second time before Hamid yanked him away from there.

The battle had traveled at least two stops beyond chaos. Whether or not Aiffe had ever understood that her summonings could not be controlled to the point of pretending to kill, that pretending was not in them, it was clear that she had never considered their effect on Garth’s own men. Some of his mightiest fighters were plainly distracted with fear of them and seemed positively grateful to be taken early out of the action. Others were astonishingly outraged, turning on their terrifying allies to defend Simon Widefarer’s knights from any assaults but their own. Aiffe’s summonings struck back without hesitation, and the real swords drew real blood, leaving men on both sides staggering halfblind with scalp wounds, useless sword arms and badly slashed legs from attempts at hamstringing. Farrell himself took a blow across the chest that drove Julie’s chain mail deep into his flesh, leaving the ring-pattern visible—and breathing an activity not to be engaged in lightly—for more than a week. The five of them could kill us all.

Later, he and Hamid agreed that John Erne would have been proud of his combat students, and that they in turn owed him their lives, though most of them never knew it. Impossibly overmatched as they were against twelfth-century professionals, the moves and defenses he had taught them saved them at least from being instantly hacked down where they stood. Farrell saw a plump boy, his straggly blond mustache thick with blood, fake the Norman off-balance with hip movements as slick as a basketball player’s; and he saw one of the Crusaders launch an overhead cut at the Ronin Benkei which would have split a wooden shield and the body behind it as well. But the Ronin Benkei sidestepped and brought his round steel shield up so hard that it slammed the sword out of the Crusader’s hand, sending it tumbling all the way to the flattened inner gate. He never did get it back, but made wicked do with a dagger after that. Farrell was always sure that Garth de Montfaucon kept the sword.

There was an immense shouting going on somewhere now, carving a name over and over into the dusty twilight: “Eyvindsson! Eyvindsson!” Ben was standing near the gate, roaring and swinging an axe as long as one of the great twohanded swords. His face was the way Farrell had seen it once before, blazing pale, bent with another man’s rage out of time and with a delight in rage for which Farrell knew a few dead words. The longaxe whipped around his head, making a sound like a big animal panting, and Ben howled the name as if in awful mourning for himself. “Eyvindsson! Eyvindsson! Eyvindsson!”

Aiffe’s five summonings made straight for him, and he took them on as they came, in pairs or all at once, sometimes using the axe handle like a quarterstaff to crack their heads and ribs, sometimes driving them before the whimpering crescent of the blade, never giving them a moment to gather themselves for the kind of fighting they knew, but battering them ceaselessly with a toy which could never have broken the skin. Farrell realized later that they must surely have known the terror of the berserker in their own time, and that it was this that routed them, and not so much the fact that Ben knocked the Venetian briefly senseless with one end of the longaxe, then caught the Norman full amidships with the other and drove him out through the gate like a croquet ball. That was the true end of the War of the Witch; the other four simply followed him, professionals cutting their losses. Aiffe ran at them, shouting, but they were already long gone into the darkening air, clearly seeking the place where they had lurched from a reasonable world to this one. Farrell thought he saw them find it, just before the trees hid them.

Yet he was to wonder a little, imagining them stranded here like Mansa Musa, poor free-lances, slurped up onto Parnell Street to roam crazy among the pretend crazies and the half crazies, among the quiet young men dreaming about killing somebody morally. They might do just fine, what do I know? Maybe it happens a lot more than I think. Probably wind up in Central America. He never saw them again, nor ever wanted to, but he never quite stopped looking.

Simon’s final charge, trapping Garth and his surviving knights between the sword and Ben’s axe, was utterly anticlimactic for everyone involved. When the head referee bawled, “Sunset and hold!” the plywood castle—dissolving now at all four corners, and with two walls tottering—remained in the possession of some dozen filthy, laughing men sitting on the ground. They raised a cheer, faint and thickthroated and mocking; and Ben became still at last, staring around him with a sick, flinching face, letting the longaxe trail to the ground. The head had been wrenched sideways on the splintering haft, and Farrell saw torn leather windings and a snowy dribble of plastic foam.

There was little sense of celebration. Dead men rose up and dusted themselves, chatting about weapons with their breathless killers, while the two medical students who served as paramedics dressed and bandaged real wounds, increasingly inexplicable. Prisoners drifted in through a deepening mist to arrange ransom terms; some tidying was done, and even a certain amount of dutiful ale-drinking and singing of victory. Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner had vanished with the sun. In time several men went to find Crof Grant.

Not a mark was on the body, nor was there any blood on the leaves where he lay. Ben and Farrell stood together on the island’s abrupt shore, watching the first rowboat heave away toward the lights. Nearby, Hamid ibn Shanfara was chanting a lament for all the fallen, as he did each year. “Gaily went they to the gods, this morning’s comrades.” The saffron shirt gleamed pink for an instant until the shadows took it.

Farrell said, “I kept hoping that somebody from another time couldn’t really kill somebody in this one.” Ben did not answer, and Farrell felt compelled to keep talking. “Well, Sia called it, after all,” he said. “Sia and Hamid.”

When Ben turned, his face was fifteen years old, an eggshell of pain. “They called two different deaths,” he said. “Egil’s gone.”

Farrell stared at him. The naked face said, “He’s dead. Egil’s dead. I felt him die.”

Farrell touched his shoulder, but Ben moved away. “You mean, you lost contact, the connection got broken. Is that it?” Right, Farrell. Of course that’s it. He wanted to put his arms around Ben, as he had seen Ben hold Sia, but he was afraid to.

“I mean he’s dead,” Ben said, “In his time, his real time, at the age of thirty-nine.” Farrell started to speak, then let him continue, anticipating the question. “I don’t know what he died of. I’ll never know. People died all the time back there in the ninth century; thirty-nine was getting on. But I’ll always think he died of me. Of what I did to him, what I made him do. I mean, maybe I wore him out, gave him an ulcer, a heart condition, a stroke.” His face convulsed suddenly, but no tears came. “I felt him die, Joe. I was trying to brace the gate, and he died.”

“That’s why you were calling his name like that.” Ben was scrubbing furiously at his mouth with the edge of his fist, scouring away the taste of death. Farrell said, “You don’t know you killed him. You don’t, Ben.”

The fifteen-year-old face turned toward him again, oddly swollen and lumpy in the dusk, as if swallowed sorrow had produced an allergic reaction. Ben was smiling slightly. He said, “You see, if I don’t know, I’ll wonder about it for the rest of my life. If I accept the fact that I really killed him, killed him a thousand years ago, then maybe I can stop thinking about it one day. Doesn’t seem too likely, but maybe.”

“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.