The schedule was easy and uneventful to maintain, and, as Ben had predicted, completely unnecessary. Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner made no approach to the house, though Ben and Farrell juggled night watches as well as seminars and rehearsals and slept in their clothes like firemen. Sia appeared to notice the new surveillance no more than she noticed anything else human, which made it even more surprising when she insisted that Ben accompany Farrell to the Whalemas Tourney. He tried to make a joke out of his refusal, saying, “You had me dragging after him all through that stupid goddamn war on the island, and he didn’t even have the grace to get killed. Enough, already, he can take care of himself.”
But there was no arguing with her; she said only, “I need to be alone and I am too tired to make up a good lie for you. Watch those two at the tournament, if you like, and if they leave while it is still going on, then you may come back here. Otherwise, you are to stay until everything is over.” She was mumbling from far away, sounding almost apologetic in the face of Ben’s anger and distress, but there was no arguing with her.
From the first, the tourney had always begun at noon on the front lawn of the Waverly Hotel. Farrell went in slashed blue trunk-hose and a jade-green velvet doublet; but Ben, going under protest, wore sneakers, jeans, a felt fishing hat, and a ragged denim jacket over a T-shirt bearing a family portrait of the Borgias. “I don’t dress up anymore. This is the Whalemas Tourney, I can wear any damn thing I feel like.” Looking back at the house as Madame Schumann-Heink grumbled flatulently away down Scotia Street, he said absently, “Like your threads, though. Early Burt Lancaster, very rich period. Very classy.”
“Julie gave them to me,” Farrell said. “Ben, I know she won’t be all right without us, but she’ll be the way she wants to be. We have to honor that, just to comfort ouselves.”
Ben said, “Farrell, when I want California pieties, you’ll be the first I’ll ask.” They drove the rest of the way in silence, until, nearing the Waverly, he asked a very different question rather gently. “How’s she doing, by the way, Julie? You guys talking to each other at all?”
“We call,” Farrell said. “Micah sleeps a lot. Sometimes he has terrible nightmares and then he cries for hours. But he knows who he really is and what century he’s really in. We progress.”
“We certainly do. He’s already overqualified to be President. Will she be coming to the Tourney?”
Farrell shook his head. “She’s like you, it would take Sia to make her go. And she’s got this other person to take care of, and I am being civilized about it. I cannot believe how civilized I am being.”
“Um. Egil didn’t think much of our civilization, the little he saw of it. He thought it was probably all right, for people who really didn’t care a lot about anything.”
There was no parking left at the Waverly, and they were lucky to find curb space two blocks away. The great front lawn was sown with pavilions extending in wildflower clumps and surges across the courtyard, past the triton fountain and around to the rear of the hotel, overflowing the ornamental carriageways into the parking lot. The standards and blazons of the high nobles—the Nine Dukes and three or four others—were displayed in a grand arc facing the lists—an open stretch of greensward, bounded only by the lords’ pavilions and, at the far end, the gilded double throne—half porch swing, half howdah—in which King Bohemond and Queen Leonora would sit. There were merchants’ and craftsmens’ booths and the usual small dais for the musicians. Bright skeins of pennons and ensigns frisked up from many of the tents directly to the awnings and window ledges of the Waverly, so that the Tourney appeared to be a true part of the castle itself—a summer dishevelment, a careless unraveling of austere towers. The banner of the League—a crowned golden Sagittarius on a field of midnight blue—floated from the highest turret of the Waverly.
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.