The musicians had downed their instruments and were accepting paper cups of wine from all sides, as the dancers dispersed to seek their own refreshments in the pavilion. Julie shook her head and rubbed her arms. She said, “Her name is Rosanna Berry. She goes to high school. She’s fifteen years old.”
Farrell studied the taut, haughty figure, at once a princess and a skinny golliwog under the splendid splash of hair. “Mustn’t forget to give her Prester John’s regards. The very throne may depend on it.”
Julie stood up abruptly, brushing leaves from her gown, looking away from Farrell as he rose with her. “Let’s go home,” she said. “I shouldn’t have brought you here.” She spoke rapidly, almost mumbling. Farrell had never heard her voice so strangely dimmed.
“Why?” he asked. “Jewel, I didn’t mean to make fun, I’m sorry.” He took her hand, turning her to face him. “I’m just trying to pick up on the rules of the game,” he said. “Jewel, what is it? I’m really sorry.” Beyond her he could see Garth de Montfaucon making his way toward the musicians, towing the girl Aiffe after him. She trailed along serenely, smiling and shaking her hair.
Julie’s hand felt like Pierce/Harlow’s knife skidding distantly through his own. Still not quite looking at him, she said, “Of course it’s a game. Middle-class white people running around in long underwear, assistant professors hitting each other with sticks, what else could it be? Thanks for reminding me, Joe.”
“Do you forget?” She did not answer him. Farrell said, “Old Garth—I’ll bet it’s no game for that boy. I’ll bet Garth forgets a lot.” He wanted to ask her about Ben, but told himself that it could wait until they were home. Instead he asked, “Why did you bring me here? Because of the music?”
Crof Grant ambled improbably by, munching on a dripping turkey leg and chanting with the vacant volume of a sound truck:
Julie slipped a pale circlet of woven clover stems over Farrell’s right hand. “Favor from a lady,” she said absently. “You have to have a name and a favor.” She smiled at him then and linked her arm in his, as briskly back with him as she had been suddenly gone somewhere cold and narrow. “Because of the noises,” she said. “Come on, let’s go meet King Bohemond of Huy Braseal.”
They crossed the clearing slowly, pausing often for Julie to be greeted as a sister by personages out of Charlemagne’s world, and Saladin’s, and Great Harry’s. Farrell was presented to a bright swagger of tunics, tabards, doublets, and mantuas answering to such names as Simon Widefarer, Olaf Holmquist, the Lady Vivienne d’Audela, Sir William the Dubious, and Don Claudio Baltasar Ruy Martin Ildefonso de Sanchez y Carvajal. They said, “Lady Murasaki, it me rejoiceth to see thee here again,” and, considering Farrell, “Well, my lady, and what sweet scoundrel is’t you bring us, say now?” Farrell was most taken with the Lady Criseyde and her husband, Duke Frederik the Falconer—they had almost identically dark, angular, shy faces—and with the black woman, whose companion introduced her as Amanishakhete, Queen of Nubia. Farrell bowed over her hand and was told, “Pay him no mind, he calls me anything comes into his head. My name is Lovita Bird, and honey, there is no improving on that.” He also met the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, whom he had last seen in the green convertible, wearing nothing but gold chains. Close to, she looked exactly like a blunt-faced, jasper-eyed Persian cat, and she scratched Farrell’s palm when he kissed her hand.
There was no sign of Ben anywhere. Farrell would have liked a closer look at Aiffe, but she had vanished, though Garth de Montfaucon was ever present on the edge of all encounters, twiddling his mustache or the hilt of his sword. Then Julie was curtsying demurely before King Bohemond, murmuring, “God keep your Majesty.” Farrell dropped enthusiastically to his knees and cried out, “Long live the king! Kings may override grammar!”
King Bohemond said, “What the fuck?” The men standing with him all cleared their throats, and the king mumbled wearily, “Sorry. What bodeth this outlandish manner of exhortation?”
“It’s my favorite proverb about royalty,” Farrell explained. “The Emperor Sigismund said it, sixteenth century sometime. I think they called him on using the dative case instead of the ablative.”
“Way to go,” the king grunted. He put both hands on Farrell’s shoulders, patting him in little tentative dabs. “Rise,” said King Bohemond. “Rise, Sir Pooh de Bear, most faithful of all my knights.” Farrell rose with some difficulty, for the king was leaning heavily on him, humming what sounded like Your Cheatin‘ Heart to himself. Farrell managed it by clinging unobtrusively to the griffin-embroidered silken stole that crisscrossed on Bohemond’s chest.
Julie said, “May it please your Majesty, behold, I have brought for your pleasure the flower of lute players, the true nonesuch of Huy Braseal.” Farrell blushed, which surprised him very much. He began to explain about his geas, but Julie interrupted and did it for him, speaking the moonshine English as trippingly as if she had been born to it. The king watched her with grudging admiration.
“Damn castle talk wears me out,” he complained loudly, wheezing nut-brown ale all over Farrell. “I call it castle talk because you can’t call it a damn language, it doesn’t have any rules. Just so it sounds like Prince Valiant would have said it. Pitiful, you know?”
The red Tudor cleared his throat again. “Sire, my liege, will’t please you join the Queen? She waiteth upon you even now, for to lead the galliard.” He had a high, toneless voice and deepset eyes like pearls.
“Castle talk,” King Bohemond said. “MGM talk, Classic Comics talk—Walter Scott, for God’s sake, it’s all bits and snatches of Scott, anyway.” His voice rose, turning sadly spiteful. “Of course, it doesn’t matter to them. They aren’t in ethnolinguistics, they don’t feel the slightest responsibility to language. I mean, fuck syntax, fuck morphology, right? Hey, whatever feels good.”
He spread his arms wide, striking an attitude of grinning, mindless benevolence. His crown fell off, and Farrell bent to pick it up. “Your Majesty, the Emperor Sigismund may have meant only—”
King Bohemond said, “Nobody is above grammar. I mean, that’s like being above digestion, right?” He grinned messily at Farrell, jabbing a companionable elbow into his side. “See, I’m embarrassing them, look at them.” He glowered around him at the amused noble lords and damsels who came drifting up over the grass in their tights and mantles and gently eddying gowns. “Nobody ever expected me to come out of nowhere. They pass that crown back and forth like a fucking basketball. I was not expected. So now they’re stuck with this goddamn peasant, this peasant king. Because, of course, nobody ever volunteers to be a peasant, some poor, ignorant, shitkicking serf, they use him for the fifty-yard line in their goddamn tournaments. So the king has to do it, the king has to represent the masses. Whole new tradition around here.”
A harshly handsome young woman, taller than he, was abruptly at his side, whispering grimly to him as she rubbed with a wet finger at a stain on his alba camisia. King Bohemond wriggled away from her, mumbling, “A people’s king,” but she moved with him, straightening his crown and tucking the trailing ends of his stole back into his girdle.