She had not become mute or autistic; when she chose, she still spoke in connected sentences on subjects enough to get through most dinners, providing that Farrell cooperated by avoiding any mention of the League for Archaic Pleasures or the War of the Witch. Their meeting with the great goddess Kannon under alien, unbearable stars was also off limits, though she surprised him by asking about Micah Willows, with a faraway flash of her old mischief. “Now I don’t want to find out that he has already rented out Mansa Musa’s room. He is not to be taking in any more boarders, please.”
“He isn’t,” Farrell assured her, adding without having planned to, “I think he’s likely to be a boarder himself pretty soon. I think Julie’s probably going to have him stay with her for a bit, after he gets out of the hospital.” She had never suggested this to him, but he knew it suddenly to be true.
The two weeks were a bad time. He was lonely for Julie and as deeply afraid for Ben and Sia as if they were his aging parents. There was no one for him to talk to except Hamid ibn Shanfara. Hamid sympathized, but had his own problems. “Whalemas Tourney coming on like the Concorde, and I am not ready. Usually got the whole war wrapped up tight by now, your basic epic, full of heroic deaths and family trees, suitable for framing, member FDIC. But this war was hard to get a grip on, you might have noticed that.” Farrell nodded. Hamid said, rather gently, “And you better go practice your music. Be a lot of work for us both at the Whalemas Tourney. New king to be crowned, no question about that, and a bunch of squires being made knights, and a whole lot of singing and dancing, and probably a mummers’ play in the evening, you know they’ll be needing musicians for that. We’ll keep ourselves busy and then, after that, we can quit the League.” Farrell was silent for a moment and then nodded again. Hamid said, “It’ll be time.”
There was a convention of horseless-carriage collectors at the county fairgrounds. Farrell went on a picnic with them, riding in the back of his boss’ 1904 Packard. The participants wore cloth slouch caps, knickers, long dusters, flowered bonnets and picture hats, gauntlets, high-buttoned shoes, and aviator scarves. They were friendly and talkative, as clean as their spidery little machines, and many among them, both old and young, seemed themselves somehow restored, the dirty precipitations of their usual time scoured lovingly away from them. Farrell noticed that they never strayed very far from the cars, but clung to them physically, as if to seats on a sanctified wagon train. He laughed at that to himself; but when the whole caravan set off on their tour of back roads and small towns, the air did begin to taste wilder and younger, and the country almost imperciptibly to seem less certain, less amenable. Farrell saw a deer, a black squirrel, and—in marshy ground, when the cars splashed across a shallow brook—the footprint of a very large cat. In a while, he became aware that he was looking for jet trails and for television antennas above the trees.
When they arrived at the picnic ground, Briseis was waiting, desperately apologetic but quite firm. Farrell pretended at first not to know her, then took her aside and yelled at her and, as a last resort, tried to seduce her from her duty with deviled eggs and grapes. Briseis wagged and fawned and bounced; and they rode back to Avicenna together in the 1898 Citröen of a cat breeder whose beeper had gone off. On the way, Farrell whispered to Briseis, “This is absolutely the last time you do this to me. How do you think it looks?” He was hoping the cat breeder would not overhear him, but she did.
The front door of Sia’s house was unlocked. In spite of the summer heat, the rooms downstairs were small with cold, as if no one lived there. Farrell felt a curious headachy pressure on his sinuses; it had begun as soon as he stepped through the door. He went from one room to another, calling for Sia, and then climbed the stairs with Briseis scrambling behind him. He could not even smell Sia in her bedroom, bath, study or office, and he knew her smell almost as well as he knew Julie’s. He went downstairs again and came back up, checking every room two or three times, knowing how still she could sit and how easily he could pass her by. At last, he turned to Briseis and said aloud, “Okay. This house has places I’ve never seen.” Briseis looked at him as boldly and steadily as she had done once before, on the blue alligator train. Farrell said, “Well, you’re the familiar around here, you show me.” Abruptly Briseis pushed past him and trotted down the hallway that led to the linen closet. It was considerably longer than Farrell remembered when he followed her.
He had long since come to terms with the fact that he would never truly know how many rooms and windows there were in Sia’s house, nor where certain corridors went now and then. Farrell knew false walls and secret passages when he tapped them; this was a matter, not of hollowness, but of plenitude, of alternatives thriving in the same space at the same time. The fact of this did not frighten him, as long as he only saw it out of the corners of his eyes, but the concept made him giddy, especially in the attic. He called after Briseis, “Hey, we’re not going up to the attic, are we?”
Briseis did not look back. She led him straight into the linen closet—which stretched away around them like a courtyard, smelling of old rainy stones instead of fresh pillowcases—turned right, or something like it, passed through a windowless room that made her extremely nervous, and started up a stairway. Farrell laughed sharply, because Sia had spoken once of a servants’ stair and he had searched for it, casually at first, then obsessively, as if pursuing some professionally legendary monster, always a slither ahead of him. Must start in the kitchen, behind the pantry someway. No, I looked there, damn it. Damn, that dog is definitely taking me to the attic.
But the stair led down, and somehow sideways, as often as up, catwalk-narrow, alarmingly damp and skittery under his feet. He had given up trying to orient himself in relation to the house he knew; the one certain thing was that the disquieting sense of pressure was growing stronger, whether he climbed or descended. Beginning as a slow closeness in his head, it seemed now to be tightening on the house itself, clenching methodically, until Farrell could hardly move forward through the bell-jar silence. If he stood still for too long, Briseis came back for him, nudging and growling him along the stairway toward what looked at first like a distant street sign, then like the moon, and then like a door with light on the other side, which it was. It opened to Briseis’ gasping whine, and the two of them fell through it into afternoon and breath and the presence of Sia, who said, “Thank you, Briseis. You did very well.”
She sat in the middle of a pleasant, unexceptional room, in a chair that curled under and around her, its contours altering as she shifted her position. She wore a garment that he had never seen before; night-blue, night-silver, it drifted over her body like the shadow of a cloud, touching her as if it knew her. It flattered nothing, outlining her thick stomach and legs uncompromisingly, but Farrell bowed to her as he had bowed to Kannon herself. A voice that only long-senile Father Krone might have recognized said somewhere, “Great Queen of Heaven.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she answered him impatiently. “I am no queen—no more, never again—and there is no heaven, not the way you mean. And as for greatness—” When she smiled, her face appeared to break and flow with light. “—I sent Briseis to bring you here because I was lonely. Very tired, too, and very frightened, but mostly lonely. Do you think a great queen would do that?”
“I don’t know,” Farrell said. “I never knew any before.” The room might have been the parlor of a country inn, without the moose head and the piano; there were a couple of bookcases, a couple of dusty steel engravings, a worn but genuine Turkish rug, wallpaper patterned with sepia mermaids and gray sailors. Farrell asked, “What place is this? Where are we now?”