Julie was standing near the musicians’ dais, talking with the Lady Criseyde, but she went to Farrell as soon as she saw him and hugged him quickly. “Where have you been?” she asked. “I was worried, where did you go?”
“Just walking a little,” Farrell said. “I’m sorry, I should have told you.”
“I didn’t know where you’d disappeared to,” she said. “You were just gone suddenly, and so was she—Aiffe—and Garth’s been sliding around everywhere like butter in a skillet, really hunting for her. I thought you might have gotten kidnapped; somebody might have been sacrificing infants. Virgins.” She laughed, but there was a shivering tinfoil sound to it, and she was slow to let go of him.
“Mostly I was hunting for Ben.” He hesitated, trying to find a way to begin telling her about the laughter under the trees. The Lady Criseyde said, “If you seek the Viking Eyvindsson, you might do well to find my own lord, the Falconer. They two are as near to being companions as Egil will allow.” She had a low, precise voice and the wary grace of a creature hunted only in certain seasons.
“I’ll check,” Farrell said shortly, startled to feel a mean high-school squeeze at the thought of Duke Frederik being Ben’s preferred friend in this world. He said, “Tanikawa, Jewel, I have to talk to you,” but both Julie and the Lady Criseyde were staring past him, unhearing, leaning forward with their mouths slightly open. Farrell turned, knowing what he was going to see and hoping he was wrong.
A little way from them, the girl Aiffe was leading a boy of her own age into line for a new pavane. He was as slender as she and perhaps half a head shorter, but he carried himself with a bold lilt that made him appear to look down at her. In the torchlight, his hair was impossibly yellow—dandelion-thick, so ridiculously, insultingly rich and molten as to make the moon look like pale margarine—though his skin was a smooth, sallow, olive color. He was dressed all in green, from his surcoat to his hose, wide belt, and shoes, and Farrell thought inanely, Of course, if she can call him here from wherever he was, she can damn sure put some clothes on him. Aiffe was smiling, holding the boy’s arm tightly with both hands.
The Lady Criseyde said softly, “Now that’s none of ours, that’s no child I’ve seen before.” The yellow-haired boy whispered to Aiffe, making her giggle and rub her shoulder against his. They had a curious air of brother and sister about them; they might have been conspiring to play a trick on a roomful of overfed uncles and aunts. Aiffe could not stop smiling.
“The Kingdom Under the Hill,” Julie suggested. “They turn up here all the time.” The musicians began to play Cutting’s Pavane far Mistress Knollys, and Nicholas Bonner made a reverence to Aiffe that reminded Farrell of the tense little wriggle of a flame. She snickered again and curtsied like a stork settling down on a chimney.
The Lady Criseyde had slipped away to pick up her drum and join the music. Julie moved close to Farrell, taking his hand. Nicholas Bonner danced with Aiffe like a flame taking a deeper, brighter hold on a log, digging in. As grave and demure as his dance was, Farrell could feel the sweet, burning laughter crackling in each movement, barely contained, roiling joyously under the solemn skin of the pavane. He heard the terrible thankfulness as well, and the husky voice greeting itself under the trees: “Arms, legs, senses, fancies, follies…”
“He’s not from California,” he said. “Believe me.” When he turned to Julie, her face was the color of city ice. Farrell raised the hand she was gripping to touch her cheek and felt her grinding her teeth in a failing effort to keep them from chattering. He said, “Jewel,” but she would not look at him.
The pavane ended, and Nicholas Bonner quickly imitated the other dancers’ grand reverence to the musicians; but Aiffe, as before, remained insolently erect, even tugging at Nicholas Bonner’s hand to pull him up again. Abruptly she released him and came walking straight toward the dais where Farrell stood with Julie. Nicholas Bonner followed at the pace of the pavane, still dancing serenely by himself. Aiffe stopped before Farrell and grinned at him, pushing her hair back from her shiny forehead.
“Hey, you are just fantastic,” she said. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you. You are just a fantastic musician.” She punched his arm clumsily.
Farrell bowed without answering. Her nose was as bony as that of a much older woman; her mouth was flat and muscular, her pointed chin as abrupt as an elbow, and the tanned skin bore faint swirls and granulations of acne. But her eyes were green and blue and gray, with the pupil shading imperceptibly into the iris, so that looking into them was like lying on his back, watching clouds in the late afternoon. The lids were arched and full in the center, narrowing quickly to the corners, giving her eyes the shape of tapestry diamonds or spearheads.
“What’s your name?” she asked. “Are you a professional? I mean, do you play somewhere? On, this is my friend Nick Bonner.” She paid no attention at all to Julie.
Farrell had never seen anyone as beautiful as Nicholas Bonner. The nearest thing to it was his memory of a battered stone head in a New York gallery—a fist-sized fragment, supposedly a North Indian image of Alexander the Great, with a face that smiled straight into Farrell’s skull, as Nicholas did now. The statue’s complexion had been scarred and smudgy, while Nicholas Bonner’s skin was as perfect as water, and its clump of chipped gray curls would have looked like fossilized mange beside the boy’s absurdly glorious golden crest; but he might have modeled for the fullness of the high cheeks, the mouth’s drowsy suggestion of a lift at one corner, and the entire air of soft knowing, so sensuous as to be almost sexless. But the stone eyes were the more human. Nicholas Bonner’s eyes were the color of champagne, the color of lightning, and to meet them was to look through a summer window into the ravenous old nothing of a black hole. Farrell thought with an odd unexpected sympathy, Oh, he probably never could do anything about the eyes. Nicholas Bonner said, in his light, happy, courteous young voice, “I have great joy of our meeting, good my lord.”
Does he know that I saw him? Farrell’s heart was hiccuping painfully, and he could not make himself look into Nicholas Bonner’s eyes again. “I am a poor thumping tunester, no more,” he answered Aiffe, “playing everywhere for a night, and nowhere for two.” Nicholas Bonner smiled at the moon, continuing to sway from foot to foot, never quite letting go of the pavane. Well, if I hadn’t danced in as long as I guess he hasn’t danced. He squeezed Julie’s hand gently and winked at her.
Aiffe’s teeth were thin and sharp, fish teeth. She made a prim face, lowering her glance and murmuring in the League talk over joined hands, “Sir troubadour, I am called Aiffe of Scotland, Aiffe of the North, and this night my soul is given altogether to dancing. Tell me now truly who you are, and what estate you claim in your own country, and then, of your kindness, come and partner me a little while. I am Aiffe.”
“My lady, there is a geas,” he began but she interrupted him swiftly. “Nay, what are such tinpot forbiddances to Aiffe? Be assured, you will come to no harm in revealing your name to me, but only great good.” And she ran the tip of her pale tongue deliberately over her slightly chapped lips.
Julie’s hand tightened on Farrell’s, and he remembered, not only her fierce warning, “Names mean something here,” but Hamid the Saracen saying, “You don’t even let the gods know your right name.” On a strange small impulse, he replied carefully, “Alas, the spell was cast by the mighty wizard-emperor Prester John himself, and who shall defy such a ban? I pray you therefore, ask me no more, or I may well yield to your grace, and I would not have you mourn that you called my doom upon me.” In alley and playground football, his specialty had always been broken-field running.