“Everybody asks me that,” he said. “Jewel, since the day we met, you have never once waited around for me to understand anything. Don’t start now, or I’ll know you’re getting old. Just be careful and call me if you need me, recipes included. Eat your damn scallops, you made such a thing about them.”
Julie said quietly, “I am getting old.” When he left her house, she held him at the door, looking at him with a strange, angry appeal in her face. “Joe, I’m not going to tell you not to go to the Whalemas Tourney. Just be careful of yourself. Crof’s dead and Micah’s been damaged, and I don’t want to lose any more people I care about. It really does feel like getting old, going bad, feeling my senses shrinking up one by one. You’re as weird as Aiffe, in your own little way, but I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, ever.” She put her head down on his shoulder for a moment and then she stepped back inside her house and shut the door.
In the last ten days before the Tourney, the League for Archaic Pleasures itself seemed to disappear. There were no more classes, no feasts or dances, no more comradely evenings of old music and old stories. Farrell saw only the women of the League on the street, and them almost entirely at two or three specialized fabric shops. Their lords were at home, furbishing up their arms and armor, whacking grimly away at painted four-by-fours in the backyard or arranging hurried private sessions with John Erne. In practice with Basilisk, Farrell found the musicians giving twenty to one against King Bohemond’s retaining the crown, with Benedictis de Griffin and Raoul of Carcassonne equal favorites at three to one, and Garth de Montfaucon attracting the long-shot money at ten to one. It was understood that all bets were off if Egil Eyvindsson entered the lists.
“You can’t help being interested in it, just from that angle,” Farrell said to Hamid and Lovita. They had been to a silent movie, then stopped for ice cream on the way home. He said, “When it’s people you know. I can get six-and-a-half to one on Simon Widefarer.”
“Those odds don’t mean doodly,” Hamid said. “Not in this tourney.” Farrell raised his eyebrows. “There’s the whole wild-card thing, they didn’t tell you? At the Whalemas Tourney the combats don’t have to be set up in advance—no eliminations, nothing. Anybody can challenge anybody, and you about have to accept the match.”
“Marvelous,” Farrell said. “Some back-country baron gets hot for a day, and the book goes out the window. I gather that’s how Bohemond won it last year.”
Lovita shook her head, making a tiny, subversive ballet out of the simple act of licking ice cream off her upper lip. “That girl got mad at her daddy, ‘cause he grounded her or some such, and so she put some kind of protection on Bohemond. I was there. People started getting sick, having accidents, just before they went to fight him. Frederik, old Garth, they couldn’t touch him, their swords just came sliding off the air. I was there, I saw it.”
Hamid nodded confirmation. “After that was when she really started being Aiffe all the time.”
During those days, the strange clench on Sia’s house often relaxed for long periods, though it never went away altogether. Farrell was amazed at how easily he became accustomed to the change in pressure, although to walk through the front door was like plunging fathoms deep under the sea, and his head hurt constantly when he was there. But in a short time, it became merely another condition of that unlikely house, like the mockingly mobile windows and the room so far above stairs[abovestairs?] where Sia waited for her son to come to her. Always, after a slack period, the grip would return with an abrupt viciousness that made the walls twang and the fireplace bricks whimper against one another, while Briseis only touched down once on her way to the backyard. At such times, the house smelled strongly of dry thunder, more faintly of rotting fruit.
Sia rarely left the room upstairs anymore. Farrell set out several times to hunt for her, but Briseis would never guide him again, and he never got as far as the servants’ stair. When she did come down, she moved in the house like a bear half-roused from hibernation, focusing on no one living, bumping hard into furniture, if not watched carefully. Suzy McManus could not endure to see her so, but burst into tears each time Sia wandered past without taking any notice of her. Eventually she stopped coming to the house, as client or as housekeeper, though she telephoned every day to ask after Sia.
Farrell saw something like recognition in Sia’s face whenever they met, but no acknowledgment of secrets shared, nor of any tender acquaintance. Her eyes were terrifyingly alive, crowded to blindness with the memories of a black stone, and Farrell could not look into them any longer than he had been able to look out through them. In his mind he said to her, over and over, I will not forget, you will forget before I will, and once he thought that she nodded as she climbed away from him again, struggling wearily back up to her one safe place, which did not exist anywhere.
Between them, he and Ben worked out a schedule, making certain that she would never be left alone in the house. Farrell had broached the subject differently[diffidently?] during another silent dinner, but Ben’s reaction was surprisingly swift and precise, and more realistic than his own. “It won’t make a damn bit of difference, you know that, Joe. This is not exactly keeping an eye on Grandma so she doesn’t fall down in the bathroom. We can’t protect her, we can’t do a thing for her. We’re doing this to comfort ourselves and for no other reason. Just so you know that.”
“I know it,” Farrell said, briefly irritable. “I know who’s after her and what they want—I even know why you can’t ever pop your ears in this joint. Have you noticed that it plays hell with the TV reception, by the way? I haven’t been sure what you think about lately.”
“What I think is that it must take one hell of a lot of concentration to keep this up, even for Aiffe. I don’t see how she’ll be able to think about the Whalemas Tourney and Sia at the same time.”
“I don’t suppose that matters very much, either. Nicholas Bonner can.” Getting up to wash the dishes, he said over his shoulder, “You’re feeling a little better, aren’t you? I mean, about Egil.”
Ben was silent for almost as long a time as it took the idiot echoes of that question to fade inside Farrell’s head. He said at last, “I don’t know how I feel about anything, Joe. I mostly know how Egil Eyvindsson feels. He may be dead, but I know him, I am him, he’s still real, and Ben Kassoy is something I have to think about and act out. Right now, sitting here, I’m acting, trying to remember how Ben is supposed to hold his face when he talks, and what he does with his hands.” He laughed suddenly, adding, “Maybe I could get a grant. I had one when I was studying Egil in the first place.” Through the window over the sink Farrell saw two small neighbor children trying to get Briseis to play with them, toddling after her in the smudgy lavender sunset.
Ben said, “Egil was my sanity. The real crazies go to meetings, teach what they love to people who don’t love anything, and stand around at receptions for years with other crazy people who never do give a shit about them. And they don’t know what anything is, just what everybody thinks it’s like. Egil knows—knew, Egil knew what poetry is, and what God is, and what death is. I’d just rather be Egil, but what I’m going to be is the head of the Lit Board next year.” Farrell turned to look at him and saw the same lost hunger in his face that he himself felt for other summer twilights and the tall fathers watching from other windows. Ben said, “I was having a good time, Joe. I’ll never have a good time like that again. Just tenure.”