Pushing through a growing crowd of onlookers to step onto the tourney field was a new experience for Farrell. The League staged few public events: outsiders in proper dress were usually welcome at the tilts and revels, but only at the crafts fairs or at exhibitions of Renaissance dancing or medieval combat techniques had Farrell ever seen any tolerance for the casual spectator. “We’re not a softball game,” the Lady Criseyde had replied tersely, the one time he asked her about audiences, “We’re an air, an atmosphere. You don’t sell tickets to an atmosphere.”
“Maybe so,” Ben grunted when Farrell quoted her now. “All I know is, the first couple of years they had to rent the space. Now they get it for free, and all the help they need setting up, and the hotel starts advertising three months in advance. Part of their Labor Day package.” The young knights were already banging challenges on each other’s shields, hung outside their tents, and the children of the League went scampering across the lists, kicking out at each other like horses in the wind. Aiffe led them, pouncing and spinning with the rest and, when Farrell caught her eye, she laughed silently and turned a cartwheel.
“I’ll be damned,” Farrell said softly. “Look at that. He really pulled it off.” The lists were sprinkled thickly with tiny scarlet flowers, shaped exactly like the upright flukes of a sounding whale. Farrell bent close to touch one and found that it was real and growing, not thrust into the earth for the occasion, as he had assumed. Ben said only, “Happens every year. I have no idea how he does it.” They agreed to meet behind a particular pavilion after the opening ceremonies, and Farrell went off to take his place with Basilisk on the musicians’ dais. He put one of the scarlet flowers carefully in his cap, remembering the story of St. Whale.
A pair of cornets, cold and sweet and regal, silenced the tourney field precisely at twelve, convoying Bohemond and Leonora to the throne. Basilisk followed with a pavane for the entrance of the Nine Dukes and their households. It went strangely badly, sliding sideways out of the old instruments, twisting away off Farrell’s lutestrings, jeering like chalk on a blackboard. Hamid ibn Shanfara was standing nearby, scanning a scroll of music, and Farrell whispered, “What is it? We practiced the hell out of that tune, there’s no reason in the world for it to sound like that. This is very weird.”
Hamid shook his head. “The Whalemas Tourney is weird, man. Maybe it’s the being in public or the challenging of the King, the betting—I don’t know. It’s just always like this, everything all twitchy and feverish, all day.” He was dressed as richly as any of the nobles, in flowing black and gold, with a black turban. He nodded abruptly toward the double throne, now flanked by the two cornet players. “Look at Bohemond.”
King Bohemond was clad, not in his Byzantine-cut robe of state, but in armor, with a light blue cloak over him and a great helm in his lap. His round face, always too large and naked for the crown, showed no expression as he looked on Benedictis de Griffin, Raoul of Carcassonne, and Simon Widefarer; but the gym-teacher face of Queen Leonora stared at those knights, and at every other, with wide, numbed eyes and a jumping mouth. When the cornets sounded again, she put her hand on her husband’s mailed arm. Bohemond never turned his head.
“It really matters,” Farrell said in wonder. “She looks as if he’s really going out to be killed, and she’ll be sent into slavery. Hecuba and Priam, for God’s sake.”
Hamid rolled up the scroll and stuck it in his sash. “You still don’t understand,” he said without looking at Farrell. He strode away to stand with his back to the throne and sing St. Whale’s blessing in three languages on the day and the Tourney. When his singing ended, the first fighters came into the lists.
None of the early bouts involved King Bohemond. The fighters were boys, new-made knights or else squires seeking knighthood on the field. They circled, they lunged, they left themselves as exposed as the practice posts in the backyards, and frequently they took one another off-balance and rolled to earth embraced, losing their helms. Few of their combats lasted longer than three minutes, and the referee—one Sir Roric the Uncouth, who wore a full bearskin and a pair of plaid shorts—laughed and called jokes to a wincing John Erne as he named the victors. All around the edges of the lists and on the packed balconies of the Waverly, people in jogging suits and tennis whites cheered and clapped indiscriminately and kept trying to get their pictures taken with someone in armor.
But out of those first matches the Ronin Benkei, John Erne’s fragile-looking Nisei student, came stalking in armor like jewelry—iron and leather plates laced by cords of amber, amethyst, silver, and emerald into a skin as supple and glowing and adamant as the skin of a dragon. There was gold lacquer on the leather pieces, and a thread of some rainbow inlay dancing through the iron; and two scabbards made of lacquered wood, one long and one short, thrust through his silken red girdle. He wore no helmet but a half-mask of iron, snouted and fanged like a dragon, that covered his face from the bridge of the nose down, leaving his eyes showing like black inlay in his pale skin. He issued his challenges in silence, by pointing with his longsword, which he gripped in both hands during combat. Farrell heard the deepening murmur going among the nobles as they watched the Ronin Benkei scythe down three young knights in a row, battering them effortlessly from every side, like a mountain wind. After the third knight fell, to breathe like an asthmatic the rest of the day from a two-handed blow under the ribs, Farrell said aloud, hardly knowing it, “When did he get that good?”
A yappy giggle, and Aiffe said beside him, “Hey, you talked first. A new era in the relationship.” She wore a velvet gown that was brown at the first look, and afterwards more and more charged with shifting foxy goldenness as the breeze quickened and the light changed. There were lilies and vineleaves traced in gold on her gown, and a golden girdle circled her just below her breasts. Her hair was piled demurely over her temples, dressed in a little net with white beads.
“Maybe he got good this summer,” she said. “Maybe it was a thousand years ago, doing Zen stuff in the moutains in Japan. You don’t know.” Farrell stared at her. “Well, you don’t,” she said. “You can’t tell for sure if that’s really him behind that dorky thing he’s got on. He could be anybody. He could be one of mine, even.”
The Ronin Benkei was looking slowly around the lists to choose another opponent, as was his right under the laws of the Whalemas Tourney. His glance halted briefly first on the tense face of Garth de Montfaucon, and then on King Bohemond, who nodded and half rose from his seat, while Queen Leonora looked down, gripping her thighs. But the Ronin Benkei only slid his sword back into its shining scabbard, bowed quite deeply to the King and Queen, and walked out of the lists. Farrell saw him enter a small pavilion that flew neither banner nor pennon.
“I know who you are, anyway,” he said to Aiffe. “You’re Rosanna Berry and you have to take algebra over this year and you had too many cuts in P.E. and you still break out if you eat one candy bar and you still bite your nails. And a man is dead because of you, and you really think you’re magic.”
Her eyes changed color. They had been tranquil enough blue-green as she spoke, with tiny darknesses; but now a red gold grew in them, as in her gown, brighter and brighter, though the skin around them went tight and bloodless. She said in a whisper, “You are so fucking right, I’m magic. You wait, okay, you wait, you’ll see how magic I am.” She bit her finger and ran, and he saw her stand beside her father, who was in the act of challenging the Spanish knight Don Claudio. The breeze furled Garth’s short blue cloak hard about his body and then whipped it loose again, so that his chain mail flashed on and off in the sunlight like running water.