Then it was over, quite suddenly, because the Lady Alisoun came in looking for her nephew, and Nicholas put him into her arms. Joshua half woke for a moment, clinging sweatily to Nicholas and complaining that he wanted to finish the castle. Aiffe jumped up lightly and went to join them. She stroked Joshua’s dangling leg, exactly as she had petted Sir Mordred, and retied his loose shoelaces.
Sir Mordred climbed slowly to his feet, shook himself, and sneezed. He appeared undamaged, but there was blood on his mouth and the blue eyes were dazed and mad. When Farrell tried to pick him up, the kitten bit his hand savagely and ran off, wobbling and tucking his tail like a dog. Farrell watched the group around Joshua until they left the room together. Aiffe looked back at him, grinned until her upper lip disappeared, and stuck out her pink tongue.
Outside in the garden, there were crickets and a big, soft, droopy-looking moon and some bird whistling as if it had human lips and teeth, but there was no sign of Julie. Farrell stood still for a while, breathing the jasmine-slow air and nursing his chewed hand. Then he wandered thoughtfully toward the boxwood maze, which had been designed to represent two linked and initialed hearts, in the Tudor style. It had lately been allowed to go untended until its original shape was as blurred as a cloud formation, but the path into its scrolled center was still open, and someone had pushed through the invading overgrowth before him. Farrell followed the track of broken brambles, letting the lute strings sound loudly, so Julie would know who it was.
She was standing with her back to him, looking up at the silhouettes of gargoyles on the turret roofs. When Farrell put his hands on her shoulders, she said, without turning, “I was coming in”; and then, as the sharp, monotonous cry made them both start, “I hate that stupid bird. I always think it’s somebody signaling to somebody else.”
“That’s your California surfing bird,” Farrell said gravely. “Not too usual this far north, but common as dirt, you get down around Santa Cruz. That one’s just trying to talk some other birds into coming night-surfing with it. They hate going out alone, because of the elephant seals.”
Julie turned, stared at him expressionlessly for a moment, then suddenly began tickling his ribs, fiercely enough to make him yelp and duck away. “Damn you, I believed you,” she gasped. “Right up to the damn seals, I believed you, I still fall for it.” Her fingers were digging into him painfully, almost clawing.
Farrell saw her eyes in the moonlight, forgot his care for the lute and simply put his arms around her, holding her as tightly as he could until she quieted against him. “Tell me,” he said. She felt as astonishingly hot as a sleeping child, and he thought, it could have been Joshua, it could just as easily have been Joshua as that cat. “Love,” he said. “Jewel. Please tell me.”
When she looked at him again, her eyes were dry, and her voice was perfectly level, even teasing. She said, “Just sad. All at once, all over, just sad for no reason. The American ailment, it goes away. Now you tell me how you had fun.”
Farrell recounted his evening for her, lingering over any event that seemed to have a chance of making her laugh. Elizabeth Bathory’s pythons were no help, but his mimicry of knights and ladies arguing in the League talk about bilingual ballots was good for a small chuckle; and when he described the Lady Janet of Carterhaugh trying blindly to peel Sir Mordred off her headdress, he could feel Julie’s body easing in his arms and her amusement loosening and warming his own tense muscles. She said in some anxiety, “Your hand’s bleeding, there. What happened?”
Farrell took a careful breath. “The cat,” he said. “Aiffe bewitched it—Aiffe and him.” Like the Lady Janet’s Tam Lin, Julie changed as he held her, first to stone and immediately after to a bar of soap, skidding through his hands and starting out of the maze without looking back. Farrell followed, his bewilderment quickly giving way to anger. “Jewel, you are going to hear this, you hold up a damn minute.”
The path was too narrow for them to walk abreast, and he found himself lurching and half skipping after her, constantly off-balance, his face whipped by dry leaves and twigs every time he grabbed at her shoulder. He caught up with her a bend before the entrance and barred her way. She said, “Let me by, Joe,” but she did not try to push past him.
“This is dumb,” he said loudly. “You know how dumb this is? Other people can’t talk about their sex lives, they can’t talk about money, politics, the kids, each other’s driving. You and I, we only have two things we can’t talk about, and one of them is a fifteen-year-old twit with pimples and magical powers. I never heard of anything so stupid.”
Julie said, “I want to go home.” She took a step forward, but the California surfing bird whistled again, and she jumped in alarm, and then shouted, “Damn bird, you damn bird!” at the top of her lungs. As though her furious breath had reached them, the lights of the wedding feast, seen lilting like birthday candles through the maze’s patchy green walls, suddenly shivered and went out. A figure too tall to be quite human, shaped wrongly to be entirely human, was moving between the castle and the maze in a way that was not human at all. Julie backed silently against Farrell, who was grateful.
They heard the hoofbeats first, scraping deliberately on the courtyard stones, and then the voice. “The desire of increasing riches occupieth you, till ye come to the grave. Nay! but in the end ye shall know. Nay! once more, in the end ye shall know your folly. Nay! would that ye knew it with knowledge of certainty. Surely ye shall see hellfire. Then shall ye surely see it with the eye of certainty. Then shall ye on that day be taken to task concerning pleasures.” The cold, piercing drone might have rattled in the cavities of a naked skull, but Farrell had heard it before.
Beside him Julie made a little sound like Sir Mordred when he bit himself for the first time. The black horseman was leaning over the hedge, looking straight down at them. When he smiled, the faint parallel ridges rose on his cheeks, like gill slits. “My kingdom is four months’ journeying long and four months wide,” he said. “In my city, Timbuktu, which is the City of Wisdom, I have as many scribes and scholars as warriors and as many books as I have bars of gold. The throne where I give audience is of ebony, and great elephant tusks arch above my head. Three hundred slaves stand behind my throne. Before me and to my right there stands a giant holding a two-handed sword as big as a man, and to my left my spokesman waits with his mace of office to give my answers and my commands. To the end of my eyesight, the sun blazes off spears and trumpets, armor and jeweled trappings. And I sit in the center of the center of the world and I am not touched. Glorify the Compassionate, the Merciful. I am not touched.” As far as could be seen, he was completely naked.
“And that’s the other one,” Farrell managed to say. “Prester John.” But Julie whispered another name and ran out of the maze, leaving him to trail after her once again. The big horse danced heavily away from her quickness, and the black man on his back seemed to be dancing with him as he brought the animal to an easy halt just out of Julie’s reach. Farrell heard her call the name again—“Micah”—but only the California surfing bird responded.
“Mansa Musa is not touched,” the black man chanted. Farrell saw now that he was wearing a pair of dark trousers, glinting and sliding with the moonlight, and nothing more. “In Cairo the Sultan called me his brother and desired to embrace me, as the men do there, but Allah put him away. I handle neither ivory nor gold nor salt, that they may not handle me. My wives come to me in darkness, that not so much as their shadows in the moon may touch my body. Only Allah touches Mansa Kankan Musa.”