As the sword began to come up, Hamid chanted loudly, “Hate to talk about your mama, she’s a good old soul,” and danced away to Farrell’s left. The sword flickered involuntarily to follow him, and Farrell shoved the lute into the man’s face, knocking the steel cap sideways. Everything in him screamed against the idea of using the instrument as a weapon; but he thought about vain, rumbling, ridiculous Crof Grant trying to protect him, and he hit his killer in the head with the lute as hard as he could. The beautiful elliptical back caved in as the man wandered to his knees. Farrell hit the man a second time before Hamid yanked him away from there.
The battle had traveled at least two stops beyond chaos. Whether or not Aiffe had ever understood that her summonings could not be controlled to the point of pretending to kill, that pretending was not in them, it was clear that she had never considered their effect on Garth’s own men. Some of his mightiest fighters were plainly distracted with fear of them and seemed positively grateful to be taken early out of the action. Others were astonishingly outraged, turning on their terrifying allies to defend Simon Widefarer’s knights from any assaults but their own. Aiffe’s summonings struck back without hesitation, and the real swords drew real blood, leaving men on both sides staggering halfblind with scalp wounds, useless sword arms and badly slashed legs from attempts at hamstringing. Farrell himself took a blow across the chest that drove Julie’s chain mail deep into his flesh, leaving the ring-pattern visible—and breathing an activity not to be engaged in lightly—for more than a week. The five of them could kill us all.
Later, he and Hamid agreed that John Erne would have been proud of his combat students, and that they in turn owed him their lives, though most of them never knew it. Impossibly overmatched as they were against twelfth-century professionals, the moves and defenses he had taught them saved them at least from being instantly hacked down where they stood. Farrell saw a plump boy, his straggly blond mustache thick with blood, fake the Norman off-balance with hip movements as slick as a basketball player’s; and he saw one of the Crusaders launch an overhead cut at the Ronin Benkei which would have split a wooden shield and the body behind it as well. But the Ronin Benkei sidestepped and brought his round steel shield up so hard that it slammed the sword out of the Crusader’s hand, sending it tumbling all the way to the flattened inner gate. He never did get it back, but made wicked do with a dagger after that. Farrell was always sure that Garth de Montfaucon kept the sword.
There was an immense shouting going on somewhere now, carving a name over and over into the dusty twilight: “Eyvindsson! Eyvindsson!” Ben was standing near the gate, roaring and swinging an axe as long as one of the great twohanded swords. His face was the way Farrell had seen it once before, blazing pale, bent with another man’s rage out of time and with a delight in rage for which Farrell knew a few dead words. The longaxe whipped around his head, making a sound like a big animal panting, and Ben howled the name as if in awful mourning for himself. “Eyvindsson! Eyvindsson! Eyvindsson!”
Aiffe’s five summonings made straight for him, and he took them on as they came, in pairs or all at once, sometimes using the axe handle like a quarterstaff to crack their heads and ribs, sometimes driving them before the whimpering crescent of the blade, never giving them a moment to gather themselves for the kind of fighting they knew, but battering them ceaselessly with a toy which could never have broken the skin. Farrell realized later that they must surely have known the terror of the berserker in their own time, and that it was this that routed them, and not so much the fact that Ben knocked the Venetian briefly senseless with one end of the longaxe, then caught the Norman full amidships with the other and drove him out through the gate like a croquet ball. That was the true end of the War of the Witch; the other four simply followed him, professionals cutting their losses. Aiffe ran at them, shouting, but they were already long gone into the darkening air, clearly seeking the place where they had lurched from a reasonable world to this one. Farrell thought he saw them find it, just before the trees hid them.
Yet he was to wonder a little, imagining them stranded here like Mansa Musa, poor free-lances, slurped up onto Parnell Street to roam crazy among the pretend crazies and the half crazies, among the quiet young men dreaming about killing somebody morally. They might do just fine, what do I know? Maybe it happens a lot more than I think. Probably wind up in Central America. He never saw them again, nor ever wanted to, but he never quite stopped looking.
Simon’s final charge, trapping Garth and his surviving knights between the sword and Ben’s axe, was utterly anticlimactic for everyone involved. When the head referee bawled, “Sunset and hold!” the plywood castle—dissolving now at all four corners, and with two walls tottering—remained in the possession of some dozen filthy, laughing men sitting on the ground. They raised a cheer, faint and thickthroated and mocking; and Ben became still at last, staring around him with a sick, flinching face, letting the longaxe trail to the ground. The head had been wrenched sideways on the splintering haft, and Farrell saw torn leather windings and a snowy dribble of plastic foam.
There was little sense of celebration. Dead men rose up and dusted themselves, chatting about weapons with their breathless killers, while the two medical students who served as paramedics dressed and bandaged real wounds, increasingly inexplicable. Prisoners drifted in through a deepening mist to arrange ransom terms; some tidying was done, and even a certain amount of dutiful ale-drinking and singing of victory. Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner had vanished with the sun. In time several men went to find Crof Grant.
Not a mark was on the body, nor was there any blood on the leaves where he lay. Ben and Farrell stood together on the island’s abrupt shore, watching the first rowboat heave away toward the lights. Nearby, Hamid ibn Shanfara was chanting a lament for all the fallen, as he did each year. “Gaily went they to the gods, this morning’s comrades.” The saffron shirt gleamed pink for an instant until the shadows took it.
Farrell said, “I kept hoping that somebody from another time couldn’t really kill somebody in this one.” Ben did not answer, and Farrell felt compelled to keep talking. “Well, Sia called it, after all,” he said. “Sia and Hamid.”
When Ben turned, his face was fifteen years old, an eggshell of pain. “They called two different deaths,” he said. “Egil’s gone.”
Farrell stared at him. The naked face said, “He’s dead. Egil’s dead. I felt him die.”
Farrell touched his shoulder, but Ben moved away. “You mean, you lost contact, the connection got broken. Is that it?” Right, Farrell. Of course that’s it. He wanted to put his arms around Ben, as he had seen Ben hold Sia, but he was afraid to.
“I mean he’s dead,” Ben said, “In his time, his real time, at the age of thirty-nine.” Farrell started to speak, then let him continue, anticipating the question. “I don’t know what he died of. I’ll never know. People died all the time back there in the ninth century; thirty-nine was getting on. But I’ll always think he died of me. Of what I did to him, what I made him do. I mean, maybe I wore him out, gave him an ulcer, a heart condition, a stroke.” His face convulsed suddenly, but no tears came. “I felt him die, Joe. I was trying to brace the gate, and he died.”
“That’s why you were calling his name like that.” Ben was scrubbing furiously at his mouth with the edge of his fist, scouring away the taste of death. Farrell said, “You don’t know you killed him. You don’t, Ben.”