Aiffe giggled quite suddenly, shrill as a tree frog. “I want to mess with people,” she said. “I just want to get even, that’s all.”
Farrell felt Nicholas Bonner smile then; the warmth spread through him thinly, like one of the tingling guilts of childhood, forcing him to smile, too. Nicholas Bonner said very gently, almost wonderingly, “Why, we are well met.” He held out his arms to her and moved lightly across the redwood grove, and his shadow danced after him.
She did not back away this time, but Farrell did, free of Nicholas Bonner’s shadow and of any desire to watch them further. He duck-walked clumsily until he was clear of the trees, then stood up, shook himself, turned and blinked straight into the chestnut-brown eyes and small, closeclipped beard of the black Saracen. The Saracen said politely, “Ah. There you are.”
“I doubt it,” Farrell said sincerely. Behind him, in the redwood grove, Aiffe laughed twice, sounding frightened and happy. The Saracen seemed not to hear her. He said, “Hey, the noble multitude stompeth and yelleth for encores. Time for your second set.”
Farrell grinned until his face hurt, absurdly grateful to see him. “What happened to the castle talk? You could lose your union card, talking like that.”
“I’m a bard, man,” the Saracen said. “They make allowances for me. I give them whole ballad cycles in Gaelic, Arabic, Welsh, Danish, Old English, Anglo-Norman, and great big chunks out of Carmina Burana. They make allowances.”
Aiffe’s laughter ended in a sharp, lonely cry; but the Saracen already had an arm through Farrell’s arm and was turning him back toward the clearing, chatting easily and pleasantly all the while. “Bards have it made, anyhow. Catch one of the bardic festivals, you’ll see what I mean. Everybody else has to stay in character, but if you’re competing, hell, you get to do Eskimo Nell, Stagolee, anything you want. One time I recited this whole huge epic about King Kong, did it all in iambics and terza rima. Took me damn near an hour to get through.”
He kept up a graceful patter of conversation as they walked, volunteering, among other things, that he had been a charter member of the League for Archaic Pleasures. “Me and Simon, Prester John, Olaf, maybe a dozen assorted Middle Ages freaks, all swashing away at each other in Garth’s backyard. No rules, no structure, just get together now and then and go at it. I mean, we had folks making morgensterns out of croquet balls and bicycle chains in those days, using car antennas for flails. So there had to be some rules after a while, and then people started in bringing their families, and there had to be something for the women to do. The League would never have happened without the women.”
Farrell said, “But the fighting’s still what matters.”
The Saracen shook his head. “Not the way you mean. We’re a theater, we give someone like Elizabeth a stage where she gets to be one bad, sexy, mysterious Blood Countess from Transylvania—and believe me, she is none of the above as a regular thing. Or you take Simon Widefarer. Simon’s a lawyer, contracts or something. Hates it. Hates himself for being scared to tell his parents he didn’t want to be a lawyer, hates himself for being scared to quit cold and start all over running some shoestring airline in Belize. But here—here he’s a condottiere, a free captain, best fighter in the League after Egil Eyvindsson, and he’s not afraid of anything. All we do, we give him a place to be Simon Widefarer on the weekends.”
“Do you have a place for Nicholas Bonner?” Farrell asked quietly. The Saracen smiled as vaguely and benignly as though he had not quite heard the question and could not bring himself to admit it; but his arm jumped once against Farrell’s, and his effortless amble quickened slightly. Farrell asked, “Who are you? What does this handy little repertory company give you?”
The Saracen wagged a forefinger and frowned with such elegant severity that Farrell had no idea whether he was being admonished, reproached, or very strangely teased. “Two entirely different questions, my good minnesinger. Who I am is a black man fool enough to have a classical education, and there are a lot of people at this dance wouldn’t even tell you that much about themselves. Sort of like the Gold Rush, you know, you don’t want to be asking somebody what his name was back in the States. Names are magic, names are all the magic there is, every culture knows that. Got any sense, you don’t even let the gods know your right name.”
He halted suddenly and smiled at Farrell in quite a different way—the thin, bulging grin of something that might eat grubs and shoots and blackberries most of the time, but not always. “But who I am here is Hamid ibn Shanfara, poet and son of an outlaw poet, historian, storyteller, Royal Keeper of the Lists and Legends. Some places south of the Sahara, they’d call me a griot.” His small, smooth bow exactly followed the curve of the dagger hanging at his waist.
“Another rememberer,” Farrell said. “We are well met.” Only the chestnut eyes showed the least reaction to Nicholas Bonner’s words.
Hamid said lightly, “Beats teaching. I guess I could have taught all that stuff I know somewhere, but I never wanted to. I didn’t learn it to teach. I just wanted to be it, which is hard to explain to people.” He began walking again, glancing sharply sideways at Farrell. “Like you and the lute, yes?”
“Like me and the lute,” Farrell said. “Like Aiffe and witchcraft, yes?”
Hamid did not answer until they had almost reached the clearing. There was a new dance going on, a branle by the music and the scrambling laughter. Hamid said finally, “Well, that’s a role too, same as a bard or a troubadour. Hyperborea, up in Sacramento, they’ve got one lady who’s into wicca, the Old Religion, whatever you want to call it. Looks like a filing cabinet and makes witchcraft sound like organic mulching. The Kingdom Under the Hill has witches up the yingy, mostly reading auras, predicting earthquakes. We’ve got Aiffe.” He hesitated, letting go of Farrell’s arm to concentrate on resettling his handsome indigo turban. “Now I don’t know what you saw her fooling with back there—”
“That’s the trouble,” Farrell said sadly. “I do.” The Saracen was definitely walking faster now, making for the dancers, and Farrell lengthened his own stride to keep up. He said, “Hamid, we don’t know each other, I’m just passing through, this is not my concern. But what you guys have there is no cultural-anthropology drop-out planting string beans naked in the full moon. What you have there is Baba Yaga.”
Hamid snorted without looking at him. “Man, Aiffe’s like a mascot, she grew up with the League. She’s been playing sorceress since she was a little kid.”
“I think she’s about got it down.” Farrell said. “Look, I would really, truly like very much to believe that she and her boyfriend were rehearsing the class play, or even getting in shape for some local fertility ritual. Or that I was hallucinating somehow, or just getting it wrong, the way I do.” He caught hold of Hamid’s white linen robe to stop him for a moment. “But this one time I can’t talk myself into it. I know what I saw.”
At the tug on his robe Hamid turned swiftly and struck Farrell’s hand away, saying with a sudden menacing sweetness, “Don’t grab at a bard, you don’t do that ever.” There was nothing of the scholar, the clown or the courtier about him now; he might have been a desert priest, like a brown snarl of barbed wire, confronting true blasphemy. He whispered, “You don’t known what you saw. Believe me.” Farrell could barely make out his words under the music. Hamid said, “She shows off, that’s all, she likes attention. She’s fifteen years old.”
“The real witches and wizards were probably young,” Farrell said thoughtfully. “I never wanted power as much as I did when I was fifteen.” But Hamid was gone, abruptly vanished into a glowing tumble of dancers who overflowed the clearing and spilled around Farrell, gasping and whooping and falling down. Garth de Montfaucon stalked by, mantis-graceful, mannerly as death. Farrell nodded slightly, and Garth smiled like a zipper and moved on along the way Farrell had come.