“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?”
“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.