“You see,” she said without triumph. “You cannot come in. Not even with her to make the way.”

Aiffe was almost doubled over Nicholas Bonner’s supporting arms, her mouth wrenched up at one corner like a hooked fish. Farrell half expected to see the boy drop her; but the dreadfully perfect face had already smoothed itself back into a bright mask of pleasure, and Nicholas Bonner held Aiffe most gently, stroking her shoulders, drawing his fingers down the back of her neck. He was murmuring to her, so quietly that Farrell could not hear the sound of the words.

“She is not harmed,” Sia said. “Take her home. And if there is any mercy in you, any—” She struggled briefly to say something that could not even be thought in English, then used a phrase in the wind-language. “—then leave her there, leave her alone. She can never do what you want; she has not that kind of power. You have made a mistake about her. Let her go.”

Ben was sitting up with Farrell’s aid, speaking calmly and rather cheerfully in Old Norse. The lights of a passing car swam over the porch, and Farrell saw Nicholas Bonner carefully lift Aiffe and turn her toward him to lean her head on his chest. He smiled at her with something so much like tenderness that it chilled Farrell’s heart twice over: once because in that moment the boy looked like someone who had always loved Aiffe deeply; and again because Farrell had no doubt that that particular smile was Nicholas Bonner’s top-of-the-line model, the very best he could ever do. A dark splotch was spreading slowly on the girl’s jeans, and Farrell realized that she had wet herself.

Nicholas Bonner raised his clear eyes to Sia. He said, “But it’s what she wants. She called me here, she asked for my guidance—demanded it, really—and if I left her now, she’d come right after me, she’d come looking.” He chuckled fondly, caressing Aiffe’s matted hair. “Oh, and you would find me, too,” he praised her, slipping into a baby-talk singsong. “Oh, yes, yes, she would, of course you would.” He might have been crooning to a wriggly puppy.

Aiffe was still plainly too dazed to stand, and abruptly he picked her up in his arms, holding her easily as he confronted Sia. The Sunday-best smile withered to a cicatrice on the soft golden face. Nicholas Bonner whispered, “She has no idea how close she came. You and I know.” Sia did not move or reply. The boy said, “That kind of power. She almost broke you. Ignorant, unpracticed, frightened out of her few wits, she almost walked over you. You aren’t quite senile enough not to know.”

Ben began to chant very loudly, thumping the time on Farrell’s knee: “Hygg, visi, at—Vel soemir pat—Hve ek pylja fet—Ef ek pogn of get.” The tune was dull, but it had a fine swing.

Nicholas Bonner said politely, “Till next time. Or the time after that.” He turned and walked away, carrying Aiffe as if she were his partner in one of the old court dances. On the porch steps, he stopped and set her on her feet, keeping an arm firmly around her. Aiffe staggered once, clutching at him. They moved slowly off down Scotia Street, leaning their heads together like dreaming lovers.

Sia said, “Joe.” Farrell propped Ben against a newel post and went to her. She made no room for him in the doorway, and he felt uneasy about squeezing in beside her, so he stood cautiously at her shoulder, watching her watch the street.

Behind them, Ben droned, “Flestr maor of fra—Hvat fylkir va,” and outside, the Avicenna night flowed past Sia’s house, bearing someone’s barbecue guffaw and the crackling bustle of a baseball game approaching on a portable stereo. Farrell caught a twinkle that he thought might be Nicholas Bonner’s T-shirt vanishing behind a camper truck. His right knee ached where the fire tongs had bruised it.

“I cannot control what you will remember of this,” she said. “I don’t think I can.” She turned to face him for the first time since Briseis had begun her dreadful crying, and he saw that the challenging gray eyes were alarmingly vague and streaked, and that her dark-honey skin had gone the color of scar tissue, all tone and resilience used up. The smell of her exhaustion filled his mouth, rancid, gritty, and clinging as the smoke of a garbage fire.

“Perhaps I won’t even try to make you forget.” Her voice, at least, was regaining some life, becoming almost comfortingly acerbic. “You work these things out very well with yourself, you will turn all this—” She gestured around them at the porch, at Ben, at spilled books and scattered furniture. “By morning it will have been some distant foolishness between strangers, maybe a little earthquake thrown in. You are doing it now, I can see you.” Farrell began to protest angrily, but she walked away from him, saying, “It’s not important, do what you want. I have to get Ben into bed.”

Farrell helped her, though she did not want him to. Far too weary to command him, she ended by letting him bear most of Ben’s weight as they coaxed him up the stairs, to the shoulder-pounding accompaniment of sonorous skaldic jingles. Farrell got the ruined Viking garments off, took them back down to the washing machine, stayed to set the living room to rights, and returned to find Sia sponging Ben’s muddy bruises and brushing shreds of redwood bark out of his stiff hair. Ben had toppled into a turbulent doze, still mumbling rhythmically, his eyes slightly open. Sia was making a sound, too, so softly that Farrell felt it, rather than hearing it, in his eyelids and the roots of his hair. I’ve never been this close to their bed.

“I was there when she called him,” he said. “Aiffe, Rosanna, she called him right out of the air.” Sia glanced at him briefly and went on bathing Ben. Farrell said, “The way you knew each other—I don’t understand it, but I’m not going to forget it. I don’t want to forget it.”

Sia said, “Your lute has fallen on the floor in your room. You should go and see if there is damage.” Her blunt, freckled fingers moved over Ben’s body like cloud shadows.

“Fuck the lute. Is he all right?” The resonant idiocy of the question made him flinch and brace for mockery, but she was almost smiling when she looked at him again.

She said, “No. Nobody is going to be all right. But coffee would be good, anyway.”

The lute was unharmed, though two strings had snapped. After bringing her the coffee, he sat on his bed replacing them, listening to Sia singing to Ben in their room on the other side of the house. She sang more clearly now that he was gone, and he could tell that the words were neither in English nor in the wind-language. The melody was bony and elusive, too alien to be ingratiating, but Farrell listened until it began to dissolve into him, note by note, like bubbles of nitrogen in a diver’s bloodstream. He fell asleep wanting to learn to play it on the lute, but he never could.

Chapter 11

Gone before I ever got up,” Farrell said. “First thing I did, I didn’t even get dressed, I went to check on him, and he was long gone. She said he ate breakfast, squashed a few snails in the garden, and off to campus. Another typical day down on the bread-and-jelly farm.”

“What else did she say?” Julie was seated at her drawing table, working intently over a rendering of a diseased retina. When Farrell did not answer, she looked up and waved a bamboo pen for his attention. “What did you say to her, for God’s sake? I refuse to believe you just split the paper and talked about the awful stuff on TV.”

“She doesn’t have a TV.” Farrell had been watering Julie’s houseplants, overdoing it as usual; now he leaned in the workroom doorway, pretending to examine a hanging spider fern. “I asked her things, Jewel. I really pushed. I asked her how she could possibly let him go back to work, as messed up as he was, and what the hell is it anyway with him and this Egil Eyvindsson persona of his? And she looked at me and said, how about some nice orange juice, and I said, right, how about Nicholas Bonner, where did you and that little sweetheart go to school together? And she poured the orange juice, and that’s the way it went. That big jade plant’s dying, by the way.”