The lute was less responsive than his own, and the song’s pitch was uncomfortable for his voice. He modulated into a different key, taking refuge in modern harmonies, ad-libbing a pattern of octaves over a completely anachronistic moving bass line. Wes Montgomery goes to the Crusades. But all such awareness seemed to be sliding rustily away from him like a railroad station as he played and sang a complaint eight hundred years old to fire-striped faces framed and lighted by the tall collars of cloaks, balanced between ruffles and plumes.
Even one sweet lie would have rescued me from this torment. A switchblade flick of a grin passed between Garth de Montfaucon and the red Tudor; but the Lady Criseyde hugged her husband’s arm against her, and the green eyes of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory went round and thoughtful. The tall mercenary captain called Simon Widefarer scratched his grizzled bare chest and smiled; the thick, rumpled Sir William the Dubious fussed with his sagging hose; the black Saracen patted his fingertips together soundlessly. Farrell looked for Julie and sang the last lines to her, as Pierol or his jongleur might have sought out one waiting fire-striped glance in the cold, sooty hall.
The lute pinged into silence on an unresolved chord, leaving Pierol’s formal sorrow wandering in the night. And I see no help, even in dreams, for this love which claws and devours my heart. Farrell bowed deeply to King Bohemond and Queen Leonora.
He thought he had done well enough, for someone faking it in the wrong key; but when he heard the rustling and raised his head to see them all bowing to him, as they did for musicians—the gowns and cloaks sweeping down like wind-driven rain, the jeweled chains and girdles glinting like rain in the moonlight—then suddenly he found that he was shivering painfully with tenderness and excitement and fear.
The king said gruffly, “Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.”
Farrell retuned the lute and struck into A L’Entrade. Somewhere far away the choice astonished him considerably: he had never been able to domesticate that rowdy estam pie into a proper concert number and he could not remember the last time he had even practiced it. But his sweating hands took over, attacking the piece as savagely and sloppily as the troubadours’ dung-booted patrons had gone at their meals. The strings buzzed, cawed, whined, twangled, and the music lunged up singing with outrageous exultancy to welcome a twelfth-century spring and make wild, heartless mock of jealousy and old age. Begone, begone far from here! Let us dance, let us dance joyously all together, eya!
The Lady Criseyde and her grave-eyed lord Duke Frederik were the first who turned to face each other and join hands. They moved like tall birds of plain plumage, and Farrell made slips in his playing, watching them. Other couples followed quickly as the four musicians took up the tune, the rebec replaced by a shawm. King Bohemond and Queen Leonora shoved and stumbled to the head of the double line, jumping in on the wrong beat, but leading the dance with a kind of desperate pomp, even so. Garth de Montfaucon pounced down on Julie, swooping her under his arm and prancing away with her, feigning jolly goatishness. Farrell saw sourly that he was easily the best dancer among the men.
The horns drowned him out once they got together, the crumhorns burring and humming, the shawm blasting away like a marching band. Farrell put the lute down on the dais after a while. He felt himself becoming, not at all sad, but very still, oddly content to be invisible, watching the dance recede from him. But there was as well a curious prickling deep in his nerves; an eager, elusive disquiet that turned him, almost unknowing, away from the costumed revelers and toward the darkness beyond the clearing. Where did Ben go? I should look for Ben.
As the trees drew nearer, the vague fretfulness sharpened in him, becoming something like the mood that seizes on horses when there is a wind rising or rain brooding, or when the presence of lightning sets every molecule of the air on edge. He halted once and looked back, seeing the lights and hearing the music, dainty with distance now, as he had found them when he first walked through the night meadow with Julie. But here comes the King to trouble our dancing, eya! afraid lest some youth should carry off his April-drunk Queen, eya! A fox laughed metallically on his right; from the redwoods gathering before him, some drowsy bird cooed two icy notes over and over. He heard someone singing to herself under the trees.
It was a thin, whining little song, such as a child drones endlessly at play in the dirt. If there were words, Farrell heard none, but the sound gave a voice to the restlessness jigging inside him, and he went toward it, feeling himself once more warm between the paws of the inevitable. The song rose slightly, more or less repeating itself in a higher pitch, drearily persistent. The fox yapped a second time, and the moon went out and came back on again.
Farrell never actually saw it happen; the moment was so brief that he was aware of it only as he might have sensed an awkward splice in a film—a twitch of color values, a phrase or gesture only partly accounted for. But for just that wink he felt everything inside himself—blood, breath, digestion, the cells greedily feeding and bearing and dying—stop too; and he stood where he was, while a warm breeze that smelled almost pleasantly of rotting fruit flicked past him and was gone.
Just ahead, in the older night under the trees, the woman’s song ended in a tiny, crumpled yelp of terror. A man began to laugh, softly at first.