Farrell put an arm around his shoulder, and for an instant Ben rested totally against him, making Farrell remember how the boy Joshua had slept in Nicholas Bonner’s arms.
They walked very slowly back up the path, which vanished under candy wrappers after it circled past the bear cages. Farrell matched his pace to Ben’s sidelong caution, and they moved among the baby carriages, the elderly couples, the school children harried into double lines behind their teachers, and the bright figures of older children, only half-tame, darting and patrolling like flights of tropical fish; they spoke hesitantly of dissertations, grants, departmental chairmanships and the transmigration of souls. Three boys were daring each other into leaning further and further out over the moat around the lion yard, and Farrell chased them away.
Ben said, “He’s real. That’s the main thing. Egil is a real person, right now. He lives in Norway, near a real place called Hamar, and he has a wife named Ingeborg, three children, a younger brother who lives with them, five thralls—okay, slaves—four oxen, four horses, a bunch of truly nasty dogs—”
Farrell interrupted him, resolutely ignoring his use of the present tense. “What time are we talking about? When is all this supposed to have happened?”
“Oh, late ninth century, by the clothing and the talk.” The unmistakable teaching lilt was coming into Ben’s voice. “They speak of Harald Fairhair as though he were the undisputed king, so it’s since the Battle of Hafrsfjord, whenever that really was. Iceland’s being settled, and the Danes are all over the Mediterranean. A lot of Egil’s people are teaming up with the Danes now, with Scotland and Ireland and the Orkneys pretty well picked clean. Make it 880, around there.”
They were in the aviary, standing before the battered, sinister grandeur of the marabou stork and the king vulture. Farrell had guided them there deliberately, because his supervisor was allergic to birds and rarely came near the building. Ben went on, “He owns his land, maybe a hundred acres, maybe a little less. It’s thin soil, but Egil works hard, and he’s pretty well off, probably the richest man in the area in terms of real wealth, except for the Jarl, the local lord. Fortunately, he gets on well with the Jarl, they’ve been friends since they were boys. They usually go viking together, after the harvest’s in—it’s almost a joint command by now. He’s about thirty-eight, thirty-nine. He’s a very good woodcarver.”
Farrell thought of Sia in the living room and of the blind woman being lured from the tree under the stroking of her knife. He said, “This is the one you did your thesis on. I remember you wrote to me.”
“No, that was the Jarl himself. See, the Jarl of Hamar is already sort of half-legendary, even in 880.” Ben was patting Farrell’s shoulder unconsciously in little hard dabs of his bunched fingers, as he always did when he was explaining something. “He was one of Harold Fairhair’s first allies, him and the Jarl of Lade, and there’s just a lot known about him because he’s forever getting involved in politics—wars, plots, back-room deals, insurrections, the works. A really turbulent scoundrel, but people like him. The skalds keep writing new poems and songs about him.”
He grinned at Farrell’s look. “Joe, I can’t help it, I have to talk like that. He’s alive, that amazing no-good, this minute, living his crazy life, double-crossing and flimflamming for the pure pleasure of it, for the game, world without end. I wish to God I could write that thesis again. I thought he was dead, and it makes a difference.”
Farrell saw the marabou stork coming toward them, pacing softly, full of a carrion-eater’s mincing exaltation. The stained white down of its underbody was molting, and lichenous tufts clung to the great peeling beak—arms of lawn furniture, left outside all winter—and to the swollen pink pouch, veined and soft as a testicle. It had astonishingly sweet brown eyes, set in a tiny, naked, pimpled red head like an elbow.
Ben said, “But nobody writes songs or anything else about Egil. I’ve never read a word, there’s not a single reference, I had to find everything out from him. Egil’s not very glamorous, not theatrical; he’s just a farmer, starting to lose his hair, doesn’t give more of a damn that he can help about current events. He goes off raiding with the Jarl most years because it’s a change from harvesting rocks and trees and there’s more profit in it. Like most people. He knows a lot of poems by heart and everything about the weather and a whole lot of little games, like children’s games, with stones and string.”
“And he can’t swim,” Farrell whispered, remembering Ben’s instants of sudden dreadful terror in the pool. Ben nodded. “That’s right, he can’t swim a lick—still tends to get seasick, as a matter of fact. He’s good with horses, though, and he’s a born fighter, a natural, better than the Jarl himself.” He gave a harsh chuckle, startling the stork. It thrust out its ghastly head and made a sound like sizzling grease.
“How do you know he’s losing his hair?” Farrell asked. The warm wind had shifted slightly, upsetting the smaller birds, who began to blow around their enclosures in clumsy, stuttering gusts. Ben said, “I can see it sometimes. In the mirror.”
He was almost chattering as they walked on. “Actually, Egil’s had a wild life himself, in his own grumbly farmer way. Did I tell you that he was a slave in Morocco for three years? Married there, had a child, got away when a bunch of Danes came raiding. And he was at Hafrsfjord, and some berserker type put a spear right through him—touched the stomach and went out under the shoulder blade, judging by the scar. He saw a sea serpent once, a kraken, off the Faroes. It had a goat’s head, and it stank like a dead whale.”
“What happened to his family in Morocco? Did he ever find them again?” But Ben did not hear him. He was rubbing his throat, tugging hard at the skin. “Joe, you don’t know, you can’t imagine. The smells, the darkness under the trees. They sing a lot, people sound right on the edge of singing all the time. The weather, my God, you hear birds bumping down the roof all night long, frozen dead. I don’t think they have weather like that anymore, anywhere, or darkness.”
A child running by kicked Farrell’s ankle and anointed him with something greenish and wettish. Stopping to wipe his pants leg, he asked, trying to keep his voice gruffly neutral, “What happens? How do you call him, reach him, whatever it is you do? Can you control it?” Ben did not answer or look at him. Farrell let it go until they had nearly reached the Cape hunting dogs’ yard; then he burst out, “You don’t control him. He comes by himself, am I right? I’m right. Seizures. More like late-period Dr. Jekyll, that’s what it’s goddamn like.” He had not realized how angry he was, nor how profoundly shaken, until he heard his own voice.
Ben turned to face him at last, arms wrapped around his body as if against some dismembering cold beyond even Egil Eyvindsson’s understanding. Nicholas would know. Nicholas Bonner knows about cold.
“It’s not that simple.” Farrell could barely hear him, but the dogs broke their endless trotting round and ran close to stare, blotchy tongues dripping out of bat faces. Ben said, “He can’t control it, either. He doesn’t come because he wants to come.”
“A civil liberties issue,” Farrell said. His ribs were beginning to feel badly bruised, and his head ached. He said, “Tell me what happens.”
The answer was quiet and clear, curiously formal. “I love him, Joe. What happens between us is an exchange, like love. He’s alive in his world, exactly as I am in mine. We found a way to trade times, for ten seconds, five minutes, half a day, two days. It’s just gotten a bit out of hand, that’s all. Like love.”
A keeper whom Farrell liked passed by, calling to him what the vet had decided about the rhinoceros’s arthritic hind leg. Ben laughed suddenly, the shuddering whine of a saw seized up in damp wood. “Or maybe it’s like the Groucho Marx line, how he’s got Bright’s disease and Bright’s got his.” He seemed to want to touch Farrell, but could not let go of himself for more than a moment. “Joe, nobody knows anything about being a ninth-century Viking, nobody but me. I mean, how could they? They know the damn verse forms, they know dates, kings, funeral rituals, all the people the Danes or the Jutes beat up on. But there is nobody else, nobody in the world, who can tell you a Viking joke. Just me, do you realize that? You want to hear one now?”