John Erne nodded curtly. “The important thing is keeping your own shield in the same position all the way through. Move those shoulders even a little, and you wind up tied in a knot with Sir Gregory the Grungy about to stave in the back of your head.” He laughed his soundless laugh again, but his cheeks were flushing rustily as he looked at the students. He said, “Remember, my gentlemen, this is a representation of death. This has no point system, no electronic umpires, no Olympic team. This is a matter of someone trying very hard to split your skull with eight pounds of iron. If you don’t know that when you’re fighting, absolutely, then you’re missing the point of everything, and I really don’t want you in my class.” Farrell heard a faint whiny rustle as John Erne drew breath and realized that the combat master was an asthmatic.
He asked Hamid about it later, as they were walking away from the old house with Felix Arabia, Lovita, and Matteo. The Saracen nodded, the scattering of silver hairs in his beard glinting in the blue city moonlight. “It’s under control now, but I guess it came near killing him when he was young. That’s the one truly personal thing I know about him.”
Matteo said, “Well, that’s probably why he’s so obsessed by this stuff, he’s compensating.”
But Felix Arabia hooted him down. “Fast-food psychology. Lovita’s right, the man’s crackers, that’s all. Functional, pretty harmless—although I can imagine circumstances where maybe he wouldn’t be so harmless—but a stoneground Wheat Thin.”
They were still arguing when they parted from Farrell, Lovita, and Hamid, crossing the street to catch a bus. On the corner Matteo called back to Farrell, “Basilisk has rehearsals every Wednesday night. My place—Hamid’ll tell you how to get there.” Farrell waved and smiled.
“You going to join up with them?” Lovita asked.
Farrell said nothing until they turned down the side street where he had parked Madame Schumann-Heink illegally. “The only thing I’ve ever joined was the linoleum layer’s union. I haven’t played with a group in years. Probably wouldn’t fit in too well.”
Hamid said, “Do it. They play good music and they’re a kick to work with. And you can be part of the League or not, nobody expects the musicians to do all that much. Yeah, Basilisk would be just about right for you.”
There was a parking ticket flapping like a trapped moth under Madame Schumann-Heink’s windshield wiper blades. Farrell put it in his pocket and turned with his hand on the door latch. He said, “I’ve met Prester John.” Hamid’s face became very still. Farrell went on, “You’re a griot, you’re a rememberer, you know everything about the League. Tell me what happened to Prester John.”
Hamid ibn Shanfara, whose true name Farrell never learned, glanced sideways at Lovita Bird, but it was the Queen of Nubia who looked disdainfully back at him. She had been largely silent during the combat class, paying elaborate attention to her nails and to an imagined stain on her leather skirt. She said to Farrell, “Honey, the man can’t tell you. I mean, he won’t ever tell me what went down about all that, so he damn sure better not just decide to drop it all on you now.” Hamid put his arm around her; it was the first awkward move that Farrell had seen him make. Lovita said, “It’s that girl, I know that much, anyway. Something real nasty she did, but won’t nobody talk about it. Not him, nobody.”
“Prester John was a friend of Julie’s,” Farrell said. “I really need to know, Hamid.”
“Nothing to know.” Hamid’s voice was as quiet and reasonable as the people who climbed the stairs to Sia. “Nothing to tell. Whatever happened, it happened, no way to make it unhappen.” He implied a bow without actually performing it and turned away.
“A whole lot of people sure trying, though,” Lovita Bird said to the air.
Ben’s car was in the driveway when Farrell got back, but Sia and he were already in their bedroom, although it was still early for them. Farrell ate an apple, dialed all but the last digit of Julie’s phone number twice, felt morosely pleased with himself for not interrupting her work, and spent an hour coaxing a fever-eyed Briseis out of the broom closet. She could not be dragged anywhere near the front door, so they went out back together and sat in Ben’s garden, listening to the distant respiration of traffic and the vicious squabbling of nightbirds.
Chapter 12
As it turned out, saying anything to Ben in the following days would have been like trying to subpoena a quark. He managed to be gone every morning, no matter how early Farrell made a point of coming down to breakfast, and the only weekend difference was Sia’s excuse for his absence. Farrell knew his office hours and twice used his own rotating half-day off to visit him on campus; both times he was told that Ben had left ten minutes before. As aware as Farrell had always been of his own skill at avoiding even the shadow of an inconvenient confrontation, he had never suspected that Ben shared the same gifts, and he marveled and was indignant. What I do is what I do, but I really thought better of him. What kind of model is that for our youth?
Inevitably, of course, they were both in the same house on the same evening. They were not in the same room any more than Ben could help it; but on four separate occasions, they sat down with Sia to the same dinner. Somewhat to his own surprise, Farrell let none of those encounters go past without bringing up the matter of the dance in Barton Park, Ben’s disappearance after it, and Sia’s mysterious and bruising standoff with Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner. He threw in McManus once, partly by accident, but partly because he was genuinely enjoying the new experience of being the relentless Hound of Heaven. Very addictive, wanting to know things. Lead you into worse ways if you’re not careful.
Three times, like one of John Erne’s students, Ben turned Farrell’s attack lightly, using as his shield a careless mix of jokes, digressions, and an all but insulting account of overdosing on nut-brown ale and getting clumsily mugged by equally drunk incompetents. When Farrell asked why he had kept his membership in the League For Archaic Pleasures secret, Ben only shrugged, half smiling. “Part of it was Crof Grant, I guess. I couldn’t quite see telling you that that fool and I played the same dress-up game. And it was you, too, because you’ve always had an idea of me that doesn’t go with dress-up. As if it would be all right for you to get involved with something like the League, but not for me. I really thought about your being embarrassed for me. Probably why I didn’t want to recognize you.”
Farrell looked hard at Sia, but the gray eyes under their thick lids were as brutally empty—or as full of things I can’t see—as Egil Eyvindsson’s eyes had been.
But on the fourth evening, the first tentative words out of Farrell’s mouth on the subject of vanishings and visitations brought Ben to his feet, leaning across the table to shout a furious confession. “God damn you, Joe, I have seizures! You know about seizures? As in fits? As in roll on the ground, foam at the mouth, swallow your tongue, run into walls? As in start out for work and wake up two days later in the drunk tank, the mental ward, Intensive Care? Any of that stuff ring a bell?” He was stammering and shuddering with rage, and his face seemed out of focus because of the way the small muscles were struggling under the skin.
“Epilepsy?” Farrell’s voice sounded in his own ears like a mumbled request for spare change. “You never missed any school. I was the one.” Ben shook his head, interrupting him impatiently. “It isn’t epilepsy. No one can tell me just what it is. And I never had it when we were kids, it didn’t start until—” He hesitated only minimally. “—until after college.” Amazingly he smiled, but it was a flinch of the lips, lasting no longer than the pause. “As a matter of fact, I had two attacks when we were living on Tenth Avenue. One time you weren’t home, and the other you were busy with some girl, you wouldn’t have noticed a UFO. And they were a lot milder back then, the seizures.”