“In a pig’s coochie, honey.” Lovita Bird patted his hand. “Metro Transit, eight hours a day hauling one of those big, whonking, articulated mothers across two county lines and the damn Bay Bridge. Throw them off when they’re drunk, they stick me up when they’re stoned, call me names when they’re straight. You think I could stand that shit if I thought it was real life?”
Aiffe’s laughter prickled around the edges of everything, rubbing raw places in the joyous evening. Farrell had glimpsed her two or three times, usually slipping between couples like a memory, teasing either the man or the woman away with her, to dance or to whisper. He had not seen Nicholas Bonner anywhere.
He moved on quickly to sit in a corner with several children, who were playing a strange game, juggling walnuts from hand to hand. All were in full costume, kirtled and tabarded miniatures of their elders, and even the very youngest among them spoke the League talk as fluently as the adults, and more naturally. Farrell learned that they belonged to the three families who made up the household of Storisende; two of them had been born in the stucco castle. As was usual, the girls served Queen Leonora as maids of honor, while the boys went as pages or squires, depending on their ages. All their references centered on League realities, whether they were describing a tournament at “the fair realm of Broceliande in the North”—Farrell thought they might mean Seattle—or merely fussing at one another over the sharing of sticky spun-sugar dulces. Yet when Farrell asked them where they went to school, they fell effortlessly into standard California English, chattering about grades and recess enemies as eagerly as they had just debated the order of precedence at a royal banquet. Farrell found this dizzying, like hitting an air pocket.
At the buffet, while discovering that the thick meat custard called mortrews had enough of a slow-acting, spicy kick to set fire to his teeth, he was accosted by a large, smiling woman, sweetish and powdery as a marshmallow. She wore a full-sleeved, fur-embroidered black robe that touched the floor, a huge, teetering headdress of gauze and wire, and a golden belt with a ring of a good dozen keys that clattered like knives whenever she moved. “Sir Musician, you should be with your fellows,” she scolded him gaily. “Musickers are all for playing while their lords dine, to sweeten their digestion with their gladsome airs; it were scandalous anarchy otherwise.” She slapped his arm lightly and handed him a turnover in the shape of a crowned swan.
“Lady, my comrades are also at their meat,” he answered, pointing out the Basilisk crew with their wooden trenchers as laden as his. Across the room, John Erne’s Nisei pupil, the Ronin Benkei, nodded soberly to him, and Lovita Bird waved a jellied eel. The smiling woman said, “Now you are the Lady Murasaki’s man, the Knight of Ghosts and Shadows. I am called Janet of Carterhaugh, chatelaine of Storisende.”
Farrell, who had often sung the Scots ballad of the young girl who rescued her lover, body and soul, from the power of the Queen of the Fairies, could not help raising his eyebrows. The woman laughed outright, apparently unoffended. “Nay, do I not suit your imagining? Well, I am only recently become the Lady Janet—as late as the Birthday Revels I was still Draja the Tartar, raider and rebel, pitiless enemy of all who dare her mountain fastness.” Farrell remembered her, a shrilling apparition in a red wig and gilded leather mail, clutching two spears even when she danced. “But it got so boring,” the Lady Janet went on. “Say what you will, there’s no one really likes a constant outlaw, and the whole life style is just dull after a while. So I packed up Draja, bag and baggage—all her weapons, her armor, all her nasty little gods and charms and endless family legends, and her one bloody company formal—and I just sold her to Margrethe von der Vogelweide, who is so tired of being Duke Manfred’s operetta duchess she’ll take to any hills she can find. And behold, the demure but passionate Janet of Carterhaugh, who defied all Elfland for her love, and dresses much better than poor Draja besides.” She made him a deep and unexpectedly elegant curtsy and rose winking.
Farrell said slowly, “You can do that? Just stop being whoever you are in the League and decide to be someone absolutely different? You can sell characters, trade them off?” He felt oddly disoriented, almost offended.
“Personas,” the Lady Janet corrected him. “Or we call them impressions. Aye, of a certainty, we barter and alter and retire them as we choose, and no constraint but to register the change with the College of Arms.” Her sugar-white face grew damply pink as she continued. “I’faith, ‘twould be intolerable else. What, should we be bound eternally to the same outworn impression, any more than to a single manner of dress, to one ambition, one mate, one nose? This may be the Middle Ages, good musicker, but it is still California.”
A Siamese kitten who had been fearlessly scampering through all the rooms at once all evening bounced stifflegged up to them to investigate the wonderful secrets of the Lady Janet’s trailing hem. She swooped him up to nip fiercely at her chin, telling Farrell, “Behold Sir Mordred, so named because he is so wicked, wicked, wicked.” The last words were half smothered in the kitten’s fur.
Farrell asked, “Does that happen a lot? I mean, are people changing their characters all the time?”
The Lady Janet laughed into Sir Mordred’s belly, and he promptly boxed her ears. “Nay, ‘tis hardly as common as that. There are many like the Lady Criseyde or the Lord Garth, whose impressions vary not a jot from one Whalemas Tourney to the next, except to grow richer and more sure. But for those of us more fickle, the true delight lies in becoming exactly whom we choose, as deeply as we choose, and for exactly as long. Before Draja, I was Lucia la Sirena, flame of old Castile, and I may well be Marian of Sherwood tomorrow, or Melusine the Dragon Lady, and no one to look twice at me for it. Squire Tancred, Geoffrey of Eastmarch, will you knock it off?”
Two of the boys Farrell had been chatting with earlier came hurtling past the buffet, half-racing, half-wrestling, yelling in breathless, hysterical voices, “Caitiff, miscreant, I’ll have thy guts for garters!” Sir Mordred snarled, slashed the air indignantly, and tried to climb the Lady Janet’s headdress. One boy managed to wave apologetically to her as they vanished under the table; miraculously, they scrambled out on the other side without crashing into the legs or pulling the cloth and trays down with them. Farrell could follow their riotous progress across the room by the wave of robes and gowns being swept hastily out of their way.
“Toenails of the Virgin, a murrain on the pair of them!” the Lady Janet spluttered as Farrell carefully removed Sir Mordred from her hair and set him on the floor. “E’er since Tancred became squire to Cedric the Bowman, the brat’s been tormenting my Geoffrey to distraction. Pox on’t, but I must needs go deal with the wretched little rug-rats.” She curtsied again to Farrell and began to turn away.
“You live here,” Farrell said. “What’s it like for you, living here all the time?” The Lady Janet looked back at him saying nothing, smiling now. Farrell asked, “I mean, do you eat out much? Do you have friends where you work, do you and your family ever go to the movies, do you take the car in for tuneups? What is it like all the time?” Why should I be the one feeling like an idiot? Am I the one with a kid fighting over who gets to be a squire?
The Lady Janet paused and fanned her damp bosom, all the while watching Farrell out of steady small eyes the color of faded denim. She said, “I know how to put quarters in a parking meter, if that’s your notion of the real world. I have to know that, because we have no student lot at my law school. I can also balance a checkbook, send out for pizza, and help Geoffrey of Eastmarch with his computer class homework. Does that answer your question, my Lord of Ghosts and Shadows?”