The starlight came back first, to Farrell’s great joy. He had intended to watch very closely this time, to see whether it was truly bound up in Sia’s hair or emanated from somewhere outside the room. But when it was there, it was simply there, making the room float on its foundation, and Farrell too happy to do anything but whisper a welcome and hold Julie’s hand. The scent of flowers grew warmer around them as the light spread—plumeria, the gods smell like Hawaiian plumeria—making him think of Sengen, beautiful as blossoming trees. Micah Willows, or the king within him, began to moan softly again with inconceivably fearful anticipation, and Farrell had a moment to wonder, is this how it is for Egil Eyvindsson, each time? Far above them all, Sia’s face was rising like the moon: golden and weary, battered into human beauty by endless stoning. Farrell could not bear to look to her.

Then she said something in a language like soap bubbles that could only have meant, no, damn it, damn it to hell, and, as if some celestial wrecking crew had gone to work, jagged pieces of night came plunging through the walls and ceiling of the living room. What Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner together had failed to accomplish seemed to happen in seconds now, as the room ripped itself to pieces like a torn kite in a gale. But the solid old houses and libertine gardens of Scotia Street and the Avicenna lights below had disappeared as well, leaving nothing beyond the shattered suggestion of Sia’s home but a sky fanged with strange, hurrying stars and a darkness that was also moving and that went on forever, past any hope of morning. It was the only vision Farrell was ever to have of raw, random space, and he could not keep his feet under him. He crouched down among the tumbling stars, covered his eyes and vomited, thinking absurdly, I’ll never finish sanding that old Essex now, never get home to finish that.

In a detached way, he was aware that Julie was crying out, somewhere nearby, “Kannon! Sho-Kannon, ju-ichi-men Kannon! Senju Kannon, ba-to Kannon, nyo-i-rin Kannon! Oh, Kannon, please be, Kannon, please! Sho-Kannon, senju Kannon!” She went on and on like that, and Farrell wanted to tell her to shut up because she was giving him a headache. But just then the goddess Kannon came to them, so he never did.

Julie said later that she had simply stepped through a hole in space, pulling the endless, meaningless night apart with a hundred of her five hundred pairs of arms and letting it close behind her, but not before Julie had glimpsed the bluegreen shores of heaven and the dragons. But to Farrell, it seemed that she came slowly from a long way off and that she entered that place where they were through the one of Sia’s masks that had never sprung to nasty life, but was somehow hanging in perfect serenity on no wall, over no fireplace. It was a Kabuki mask, white as plaster; and as Farrell watched, it began gradually to stream with Kannon, dissolving over and over to flow into her round brown face, her flowering arms, cloudy robes, and long amber eyes. Her appearance pulsed and surged constantly, bordering always on forms and sizes and sexes beyond Farrell’s imagining or containing. Farrell saw her bow slightly to Julie, saluting and acknowledging her. When she looked at him, he wiped his mouth weakly, ashamed that she should see him so, but Kannon smiled. Farrell wept—not then, but later—because Kannon’s smile allowed him to, as it allowed him to forgive himself for several quite terrible things.

He always insisted that he had heard them talking together, Kannon and Sia, in the soap-bubble language, and that he had understood every word.

—Old friend—.

—Old friend—.

—I cannot help him. I am too tired—.

—I will help him—.

—You are younger than I and more powerful. You have many worshipers, I have none—.

—Illusion. We do not exist—.

—Perhaps. But the child called you, and you came—.

—Of course. How not? I know her grandmother—.

—Yes. Thank you, old friend—.

But Sia swore that they had never spoken at all, that there could be no need for speech between them; and Julie drove him wild by describing how Kannon had leaned down to Micah Willows and touched his eyes, actually touched them, and how he blinked and said, “Julie,” in a voice she remembered, and promptly fainted. Farrell missed that part altogether, having realized that Ben was hanging far off in the night like Sia’s Kabuki mask, peering drowsily across unhealed space at the scene below. Then Kannon bowed again to Julie—who was too busy with the still-unconscious Micah Willows to notice—and bowed low to Sia like the Northern Lights, and went away with the starlight, and Ben came on down restored stairs and crossed the creaky living room floor to Sia. He put his arms around her and held her as tightly as he could.

Micah Willows opened his eyes and said, “Julie? Man, who are these people?” Farrell stood quietly where he was, listening to the first birds, and to the sprinklers coming on at the house next door, and thinking entirely about Kannon’s smile.

Chapter 16

The war was not optional. Nearly every knight of the League, saving only the combat master John Erne and the King, was expected to take part in it, though the degree of a fighter’s activity was for him alone to choose. Farrell knew only that he belonged on Simon Widefarer’s side and that he would do something humane and encouraging on the home front. He asked Simon whether making hero sandwiches and teaming with Hamid ibn Shanfara to improvise morale-boosting songs for the troops entitled a man to noncombatant status. Simon guaranteed nothing, but recommended climbing a tree.

The rules of the war were simple and very few. The tangly thirteen-acre island in the middle of Lake Vallejo—a bay and a county away from Havelock—had been ceded annually to the League for the past several years, thanks to a combination of friends in moderate power and a lack of tourist interest in the poison-oak-ridden area. For a week preceding their dawn-to-dusk occupancy, the defending side was permitted to swarm over the island, constructing a web of plywood barbicans and outworks, as well as varyingly symbolic entrenchments, deadfalls, and mantraps, all centering on a primitive fortress, little more than a stockade atop a mound of earth. It was this castle that Garth de Montfaucon’s forces would have to take to win the war.

Combat was conducted as in any tourney, with the outcome being determined largely by honor and eight floating referees, four from each side. In the one departure from ordinary League procedures, each party was allowed the use of a weapon customarily forbidden. Simon Widefarer chose the longbow, Garth the morgenstern. In practice, as William the Dubious pointed out, it always came down to swords; but Simon’s choice committed the invaders to helmets and serious body armor, despite the special blunted arrows. “That adds up fast, on a hot day. They never write about it, but plain exhaustion must have accounted for as many armored knights as anything else, in the old wars. Look for them to start dropping around two o’clock, three maybe.”

“Can we hold them off that long?”

William beamed a bit muzzily. They had been helping to work on the wooden castle all afternoon, aided by a siegeworthy stock of Mexican beer. “Easiest part of it. The thing is, Joe, the defenders always have the edge. There are only three good places to land on this whole island—there used to be more, but Garth spent all week one year bringing in these huge rocks, and he dropped them around so they ripped the bottom out of anything that tried to beach. It’ll take them till noon just to get a foothold, and they’ll lose a lot of men doing it. They’ve only got till sundown, and we can keep them away from the castle till late afternoon sometime, with any luck at all.”