Each of them looked back once. Julie said later that she heard Sia say Ben’s name, but by the time Farrell stood in the doorway he could barely discern Aiffe in that room where even the darkness was going out. He did see the two steel engravings blink off together and thought absurdly, oh, that’s a pity, she likes those. Then he was staggering after Ben and Julie down a corridor that was disappearing faster than they could run, knowing with the most casual, distant kind of certainty that they would never find their way in time.
Briseis took the lead, or they never would have found it. They followed her waving gray tail, calling aloud to keep in contact; and though the dog fled before them with unlikely surefootedness, she was constantly forced to double back and double again, as a silent wind of forgetting tore away floors and stairways beneath their feet. Once Julie caught Farrell as he strode off into nothing at all, and once he had to carry Ben in a steep place for a while.
The serpent ring glimmered on his finger with what must have been its own light, but it was not the least help when he pointed it at the oblivion swirling on every side and whimpered, “Avaunt, get thee gone, let us be.” Oh, Sia, remember us another moment, keep us in yourself yet a little. At the last, they were each running alone, no longer calling, gone from each other as completely as if they had truly vanished. Would we know? How would we know?
They never did agree on the exact point where they crossed from Sia’s true house into the one they knew. By the time they were even aware of having burst up like divers through hallway, kitchen, and living room, they were out on the sidewalk, gasping and crying and falling down in the wet grass. They huddled together for a long while, the three of them, tending to one another under the casually curious eyes of neighbors come out to enjoy the soft twilight after Aiffe’s squall. It was Julie who stood up first to face the odd old house with the roof almost like a widow’s walk and the front door missing.
Farrell had known perfectly well that it was not the visible house falling around them, and he knew also that it was silly to expect brick to boil and wood and shingle to convulse with mourning for a struggle and a passing that had taken place so far from them. Even so, he realized that he was vainly, ridiculously angry with the house, in a way that he had never been angry with Aiffe or Nicholas Bonner. “What day is it?” he asked vaguely, and did not hear if anyone answered, but went on staring at the house, waiting stubbornly to see it slump just a little, settling into the shaded ordinariness that it would wear from now on, now that a goddess no longer lived there.
Chapter 20
The real problem was the dog.
Aiffe turned out never to have left the Whalemas Tourney at all, but to have accompanied her father to the traditional feast and dance which followed it. Any number of League members could vouch for her presence there, as well as for the fact that she had led the dances all night long, come down with flu the next day, and remained bedridden, feverish and quarantined. Farrell asked Julie, “Do simulacra get the flu? Then who was it who stayed in that room with Sia?” Julie answered only, “She said she’d do what she could do.”
In the following days—every one astonishingly warm and lingeringly generous, as early fall often is in Avicenna—a number of small things happened. Madame Schumann-Heink got a new engine, new windows, and her first paint job in a decade, all more or less acquired in a graveyard at midnight. Julie’s BSA got two new forks, and Farrell’s lute got an entire set of strings and gut frets as the price of its sojourn in a place that was not good for stringed instruments. Farrell himself got Briseis.
That part happened later, just after he resigned from the League for Archaic Pleasures. A certain amount of regret was expressed, mostly by the members of Basilisk and the Blood Countess Elizabeth Bathory. Hamid ibn Shanfara and Lovita Bird were sympathetic and slightly awkward, since they had not resigned after all. Lovita told him, “Honey, you have no idea just how much weird shit I will endure for the sake of having someplace to dress up. I’m sorry, I got to be somebody besides that damn bus driver now and again.”
Hamid said wryly, “Little bit addictive, the griot business. Down at the post office, they don’t have much room for a person wants to be an entire group memory all by himself.”
Farrell said, “Individuals have memories. Groups have forgetteries.”
Hamid laughed outright. “Tell me the difference. There’s no law against anything that child did, there’s no way to prove anything we saw, and there is damn sure no undoing any of it. Might just as well make up a poem about how old Crof Grant died in battle with ten million trolls, tell stories about Prester John getting taken up to heaven by St. Whale. Just as likely as what really happened, and it sings better.”
“But everybody knows the truth,” Farrell said. He felt mired in priggishness, and Lovita’s dimple did not help him.
Hamid said, “That’s why there’s the League, babe.”
Sia’s lawyer—a short, dashing woman with a few too many pointed white teeth—called Ben and Farrell to her office to read them Sia’s will. It had been drawn up several years before Ben ever met her, spoke nowhere of her death, but only of a possible disappearance, and left everything to him, with the exception of Briseis. Not only was the dog left specifically in Farrell’s care, but a remarkable number of clauses went into making it clear that, if Farrell refused to accept Briseis or attempted to get rid of her at any time, the entire bequest to Ben was to revert to a trust administered for the purpose of feeding the ducks in Barton Park. Farrell yielded without a struggle, but with curious misgivings. “She could see the future,” he said to Ben. “If you can see the future, you don’t just do things.”
“She saw part of the future part of the time,” Ben said. “I think she liked it that way.”
Farrell had spent the first days after Sia’s departure hovering around Ben like a Gray Lady, trying to help him deal with a loss that Farrell could neither share nor truly imagine. But in fact, as the fall passed, Ben went about his life with a quiet decisiveness, teaching his classes, keeping office hours, going dutifully to faculty meetings when no escape offered itself, working on his overdue skaldic poetry book on weekends, and even going swimming with Farrell once or twice a week. He spoke of Sia from time to time, gently and with affection, as if remembering an old lover now safely married to an eye doctor. Farrell knew just enough about grieving to be alarmed.
They walked all the way home from campus one evening, taking advantage of the last softness in the air, cheerfully debating aspects of the class struggle involved in the coming World Series between Seattle and Atlanta. Ben interrupted the argument to ask abruptly, “Why do you keep looking at me the way you do? Is something falling off?”
“Nothing,” Farrell said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was staring.”
“Every damn minute, weeks now. This isn’t the Island of Dr. Moreau. I’m not going to revert, start running on all fours.”
“I know that, I’m sorry. I guess I’m just waiting for you to start breaking furniture.” They walked on in silence for some time, meeting no one, listening to music from lighted windows, until Farrell said, “In the end, it’s none of my business—”
“Of course it’s your business; who else’s damn business is it? Don’t get all humilified on me.” He paused, and then said in a quieter tone, “Do you remember when she realized that she couldn’t save Nicholas Bonner? I mean that one exact moment?”
“When she opened her mouth and I thought she was going to cry everything to pieces, just shout all of it down. But she never made a sound.”