Sia never flinched from the blasphemous shower; rather, she put her head back and spun on her toes, like a child playing under an open fire hydrant. Aiffe’s saliva became a rainbow mist of jasmine-scented water arching between Sia and herself, even after she covered her mouth with both hands. The mist thickened, hiding Sia completely, caressing and blurring the ruins of the willow tree. Flapping her arms as if she were shooing birds, Aiffe ran straight into it. Her efforts dispersed the haze quickly enough, but Sia and the willow were both indeed gone. Aiffe screamed so loudly that the entire hillside caved in.
Farrell found himself lurching forward, at once leaning on Julie and holding Ben back. The imaginary place where they were went mad around them; the sky was gibbering colors, howling the spectrum; the landscape pulsed from jungle to desert to cow pasture with every shudder of color. There is still the room where we made love, this is where her eyes live. Where the littered hill had been, a deep grotto began to take shape, a pool as bright as a cheap toy winking at its heart. Without hesitation, Aiffe scrambled to the edge, threw off her velvet gown, and leaped in. She swam with an otter’s theatrical suppleness, constantly doubling on herself to dive again and again, hunting Sia in every least concealing shadow.
Absurd old songs and proverbs straggled through Farrell’s head as he watched her. He chanted, “Oh, what a time I had with Aiffe the mermaid, down at the bottom of the sea,” and announced earnestly to Ben, “What that is, that’s Neptune’s park, ribbed and paled in with rocks unscalable and roaring waters.” Ben looked at him with Egil Eyvindsson’s face.
Ben whispered, “Oh, God, she never could resist going back to stone.”
For all the racket of their fall, the stone fragments had not raised even a handful of foam or caused the tiniest eddy. Now, however, as Aiffe splashed and sported in overwhelming triumph, a deep, slow swirl began to move in the pool, far below her joyously kicking feet, turning the water deep green, then red, then orange, spreading steadily, picking up speed until the entire grotto hummed and sang and thrilled to a yawning note that the three watching could only feel in their teeth and bones. Aiffe understood too late; she clung to a rock and screamed unbearably for control, but the waterspout swept her aside as it surged to full height, spinning so fast now that the immense wind of it tore white holes in the mad sky and hurled Aiffe completely out of the pool. At the top of the spout Sia danced on one foot, whirling against the cyclone’s rotation, her arms bent sharply across her breasts and face. Farrell knew that she was singing again, though he could not hear her.
Naked, dripping, half-stunned, Aiffe was already up on her hands and knees, doggedly crawling in a circle, counterclockwise, muttering like a bag lady and scratching blurry marks wherever she found a patch of soft earth. She did not turn when the high, leathery fins and great rough backs began to break the pool’s surface. Nor did she move even when the rippling necks with scales as big as bricks lifted jaws that turned themselves almost inside-out trying to snatch Sia down. Only when the waterspout caught fire, blazing up with the breathy hiss of newspaper did she stand and look, gradually raising both fists to hail the impossible castle of flame that hid Sia from her once more.
Her cry was wearily implacable. “On your way, old bitch! I told you I’d never let you rest anywhere! On your way, just keep moving!”
At the sound of her voice, the waterspout billowed out into something momentarily like a human shape traced in fireworks—all sparkling hips and Catherine-wheel belly—before toppling silently in on itself and vanishing, taking the fire with it. Only the wind remained, and it was a different wind altogether, alluringly mischievous as Sia’s eyes, playful as Briseis with her trusted beach towel. Like Briseis, in fact, this wind had a toy of its own, one last living ember, no bigger than a penny at that height, but caressed and cozened by the breeze into a tiny nova, soaring over the shattered grotto. Tossed up, carelessly dropped, captured again, it grew brighter and brighter, the brilliance of its little life almost as painful to look at as Aiffe’s cries of rage had been to hear.
Far below, Aiffe stood very quietly now, watching the dancing spark for a long time before she began to dance again, very slowly, her movements strangely clumsy, slurred with menace. She kept turning her head far back over her right shoulder as she danced, snapping her jaws.
Farrell had in his life seen more shape-changing than most people. Each time he handled the experience less well; it always left him feeling as wrenched and disoriented as if he were the one who had passed through the sweet, nauseating shudder in the molecules, to stumble into moonlight on four feet. He looked away, as always, when it happened with Aiffe, but not quickly enough. Her shoulders hunched and bulked, neck and legs shortening so quickly that she seemed to fall to her knees. The metamorphosis of her head was frightening enough—the bones visibly hollowing and streamlining, but the face itself plunging forward, not into a raptor’s hooked beak, but becoming a kind of feathered muzzle, drooling through gray lips. The arms were the worst. They jolted up and out in electrical spasms, achieving magical angles, and Farrell heard them grinding in their sockets as they yanked Aiffe off the ground, even before rust-and-lichen-colored feathers had fully formed. Her feet had turned to huge, yellow-gray talons, arthritically gnarled by their own massiveness. Even the scales on them looked like miniature claws.
Farrell heard Ben laugh and almost failed to recognize the sound. The Aiffe-bird gained altitude like a helicopter, but the very power of its approach blew its bright prey constantly out of reach as it tried to close in. No swallow could have veered and cornered more neatly in pursuit of a gnat, but the ember drifted on, fanned to near-white heat now by furious wingbeats just behind it. The great claws clutched futilely; the slobbering mouth snapped and snapped; and on the ground, Ben whispered, almost pityingly, “Fool.”
At the same instant, Julie gripped Farrell’s wrist and said, “Look down.”
Farrell realized that, while they had all been gaping after the Aiffe-bird, the grotto and its surroundings had become a northern European forest, anciently dark with huge oaks, elms, ash trees, and maples, stretching almost as far as Farrell could see, to a snowy void that he looked at once, and then never again. There is no horizon. There is only where she lets go.
A little way from where he stood with Ben and Julie, an archer in red crouched under an elm tree, setting an arrow to his bowstring. When he rose, Farrell saw that his face was all of the same white nothingness, except for two pulsing amber absences that were his eyes. The Aiffe-bird tried to dodge the arrow, but it danced after her, tracking her frantic doublings and stooping wherever she fled, until there was nothing for her but to change shape in midair. The arrow flashed between her human neck and shoulder as she fell.
Julie made a little splintering sound in her throat; Ben shouted “Sia!” as if it were no name, but a blessing to armies; and Farrell, being who he was, heard himself deliriously singing snatches of a very old ballad about a king who learned to fly:
Aiffe tumbled, sprawling and flailing for a moment, before she righted herself and spoke sharply to the earth below her. The tearing branches leaned aside to let her light nakedness hurtle past, and the ground bulged and rippled up in whipped-cream solicitude, to gather her tenderly into a forgiving green lap, the breath not even jarred out of her. The ember followed her down, fluttering in a rather bored way, and vanished like a snowflake before ever reaching the ground.