Hamid and Lovita took him to his first tournament, which was staged in Barton Park, though not at the clearing where the Birthday Revels had been held. It was one of the League’s rare open exhibitions, and nonmembers in ordinary dress thronged among the cartoon-colored pavilions, the hedges of bemonstered appliqué banners, and the blazons strung on wire between the trees. Farrell saw Simon Widefarer cut down three novice knights trying to earn their spurs, and King Bohemond defend himself with surprising dexterity in the slow-motion ballet of maul-fighting. Garth de Montfaucon glided victorious out of a roaring mêlée, leaving four of his six opponents hobbling and gasping; and Farrell stood cold on tiptoe to see the ridiculous moustachios prowling down the lists, eyes squinted nearly shut, the lean body humping below the shoulders like a ferret’s body, or that of any other creature that found you in the earth by your smell. In the moment of Garth’s acclamation, his eyes sought out Farrell in the crowd, and he lifted his sword in mocking challenge. Farrell knew that it was only rattan, but its polished length gleamed in the sun like the real sword, Joyeuse, and he was glad when Garth turned away. Darrell Sloat. Remedial reading. Doesn’t help.
He did bring Julie to dinner at Sia’s house and regretted it before the introductions were over. Strangers, the two of them reacted to each other with the immediate ease of long old detestation. Farrell spent the evening bridging grim silences by desperately teasing childhood reminiscences out of Ben, and in watching Sia probe and test and bait her guest more rudely than he had ever known her to do, while Julie responded with increasingly monosyllabic sarcasm. She went home early with a headache and hardly spoke to Farrell for two days. The most she ever said about that first encounter was, “We didn’t want to like each other. Leave it there.”
On the eve of the summer solstice, they went together to the greenwood wedding of a psychiatric nurse called Sir Tybalt the Belligerent with the Lady Alisoun de la Fôret, a teaching assistant at the university. The marriage took place at sunset, on a beach where swimming had been indefinitely forbidden because of sewage spills. Basilisk played during the ceremony, which was performed by a barefoot mendicant friar, and Hamid sang Love Me or Not, Love Her I Must or Die afterward, with Farrell accompanying him and the costumed guests dancing slowly in a circle around the bride and groom. They then went on to the wedding feast, guided by two Italian mercenaries, one Druid, and two tumble-breasted Elizabethan strumpets who had all managed to crowd into Madame Schumann-Heink. Farrell drove as their tumultuous consensus directed him, further into the hills than he had ever gone, until he fishhooked around a blind curve into a wide avenue dotted with redwood condominium complexes, turned right again at a ranch-style church with a satellite dish on the lawn, and pulled up in the shadow of a canary-yellow castle. Beside him Julie said, “Storisende.”
“Sonofabitch,” Farrell said softly. “I didn’t know they built any up this far.” There were banners floating over battlements and gargoyles smirking from the stone-framed entryway. He said, “The Avicenna castles. I’ve never been in one.”
“A bunch of crazies built them in the twenties,” the Druid said over his shoulder. “Aleister Crowley freaks, or Theda Bara, somebody like that. Used to steal each other’s daughters. I read about it.” Farrell helped Julie down from the bus, and she handed him his lute, saying, “Joe, it’s a wedding. Just have fun, that’s what it’s for. That’s all it’s for.” She took firm hold of his arm, leading him toward the yellow castle.
Storisende’s four stucco towers were set around a central courtyard, busy and close with trumpet vines, climbing rosemary, overhanging plane and fig trees, a miniature boxwood maze, mossy flagstones, and a fishpond the color of onion soup. The two towers at the back of the courtyard were themselves spired corners of a rambling, tile-roofed house that had apparently changed its mind and decided to be a Spanish mission instead of a Norman keep. The odors of jasmine, wild lilac, and oleander quarreled in Farrell’s nostrils, making him sneeze pleasantly. He broke off a sprig of jasmine, placed it in the cross-laced front of Julie’s blue velour gown, and kissed her when she looked up in surprise. “There, see,” he said. “I’m having fun already.”
The marriage feast was going on in both rear towers, spilling back and forth through the main house in a tidal wash of laughter as flamboyant as a magician’s scarves, fiercely bawdy wedding catches, and the turned-earth smell of the League’s tongue-numbing homebrew. For all its blithely jumbled facade, the castle’s designer had done well with columns of sand and lime and air; the stone stairways were all external and the artfully bulging tower walls were thinner than they looked, leaving unexpected space for three stories’ worth of wide landings, and round or octagonal rooms as high as lofts, all of them aswirl with men and women whose clothes cast the shadows of great, brawling birds. Farrell drew the lute quickly against him, not simply to shield it from collisions, but to still the voices that rioted in the sentient wood and made it whimper angrily in his arms.
He lost Julie almost immediately to a pair of young girls dressed in the gold-heavy robes of Scythian nomads, who swarmed up to her crying, “Lady Murasaki, the Nine Dukes, all are here, all, hast ever seen such a wedding?” and dragged her off to join in a women’s chorus engaged in singing their own songs of carnal counsel to the bride. Farrell roamed the rush-strewn floors at fascinated random, constantly striving to down one full mug of ale before someone’s robe or sword hilt knocked it out of his hands. One room was largely given over to a buffet table burdened with platters of conger in souse, beef marrow fritters, meat tiles, friants, numble pie and florentine; in another, an intense argument concerning Senate candidates, couched entirely in the imaginary language of the League—“God’s teeth, sirrah, beshrew me, but I’ll put it to thee plain, thy man’s naught but a mewling, doddering old puppet of the military-industrial complex”—had half a dozen weapons clear of their sheaths by the time the noble Duke Frederik the Falconer could intervene.
A third room did its best to contain the admirers of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, as she held her own court, clad in nothing much but her two languorous pythons, Vlad and Bela. Lovita Bird, herself dressed entirely in interlaced bands of tooled white leather, was standing to one side, looking contemptuously amused. Farrell eased up to her and murmured, “Come on, Vlad’s kind of a dip, but Bela’s all right. Or maybe that’s Vlad.”
Lovita curled exactly half of an exquisite upper lip. “Both of them a sight better-looking than the best day she ever saw. Woman’s got no more shame than she got shape.” She snorted delicately, which Farrell had never seen done.
“Hamid says those snakes are League members. Hamid jives me a lot.”
“It’s the truth. Associate members, sibyls to the king or some such. Poor old Bohemond, he’s got to bring them those lab rats, offerings, and he’s supposed to ask their advice on things. Says so right there in the bylaws.”
Garth de Montfaucon strolled past with his arm around the bride and a side-glance like a paper cut. Farrell said to Lovita Bird, “You look great in that outfit. Did you make it yourself?”
“I look great in a whole lot of outfits,” she said comfortably. “But thank you. Yeah, I made this one, I make most of the stuff I wear here. Keeps me in mind that I’m Amanishakhete Queen of Nubia and no damn bus driver. Can’t afford to be forgetting that.”
Farrell stared, considering her slender brown arms and small hands. “That’s what you do? You drive a school bus?”