Farrell followed, his voice a mosquito’s keen in his own ears. “Let it go. You have to let him go.” He touched Ben’s shoulder again and was startled anew at the sense of his friend’s cindery fragility. “Ben, it’s not good for you, either. Whatever you’re learning, whatever wonderful things, it’s not free. You can’t keep doing it, you’ll shatter, you’ll just dissolve, like him, you will. Ben, I know this.”
Ben said, “I can’t find my goddamn car.” He turned and started back the way they had come, so abruptly that Farrell had to jump aside to let him by. His face was averted, but Farrell saw that one side of his mouth was wrong, dragged up and far back, exposing teeth. He said, “I left it here, I’m looking right at it. Son of a bitch.”
They did not speak again until the car was finally located, at the far end of the lot. Ben approached it as warily as if it and he were both strange wild animals themselves. Something in that stiff, exhausted shuffle almost made Farrell cry, and he said, “I’d better drive you home. Both of you.”
Ben shook his head and got into the car. Farrell gripped the open window as he started the engine. “What about Sia?” he demanded. “How does she feel about all this, what you’re doing? She doesn’t believe it’s seizures, that takes a silly person like me. Maybe I’ll talk to her myself, shall I do that, Ben? Because I don’t think she knows the whole story. I don’t think Sia would let you go on killing Egil out of love, not if she knew.”
Ben looked up at him and then away. His free left hand moved from his throat to his mouth, a fist now, pushing as if he were trying to staunch a mortal wound. “You don’t understand. The seizures are the way, the seizures open the way. I never had them until her. They come from living in her house, sharing her bed, being in her thoughts. People aren’t supposed to do that, Joe. The gift is too great, we can’t contain it, we tear. But it’s a gift, a blessing, how can you say no to a blessing, even when it wasn’t meant for you? Don’t worry about Egil, Joe. Egil won’t die of it. It’s my blessing, after all.” The car slid through Farrell’s hands, and he was gone.
Chapter 14
The hawk’s feet were astonishingly hot. Farrell had braced himself for the skeletal clench on his fist, for the great black eyes considering him as if he had answered some strange want ad—look away a little, Frederik said not to stare—and even for the improbably soft breast feathers, smelling first like nutmeg and fresh straw, and then like old, clean bones in the sun. But he had only imagined the power and sharpness of the talons; never the heat shocking through the borrowed buckskin gauntlet, pulsating so immediately against him that he might have been balancing the redtail’s snaredrum heart on his skin. He let his breath out at last, and the Lady Criseyde placed her arm behind the hawk’s ankles, nudging very gently until the bird stepped back onto her glove. Farrell said, “How beautiful.”
“Actually, you’re not seeing her at her best,” the Lady Criseyde said. “She started molting early this year, just to be contrary, and she’s so old and out of shape she probably couldn’t get off the ground on a bet. Could you, Strega?” The redtail said kack in a thoughtful way, still debating whether to hire Farrell.
Behind him, Duke Frederik answered for her, “Good madame, five bucks says she takes a rabbit ere Micaela comes anywhere near a grouse.” He was adjusting the leather traces on the hood of a huge dark bird, taller and much wider-shouldered than the redtail Strega, with a hulking, ominous dignity that made Farrell think of Julie’s motorcycles. The dark hawk was irritable under Frederik’s hands, stamping and suddenly rousing every feather with the clatter of a Venetian blind. Frederik whispered and crooned her quiet; then he announced, “Okay, I think we ought to move out. Lord Garth and the Lady Aiffe don’t seem to be coming, and the dogs are getting crazy. In the name of King Bohemond and St. Whale, let’s roll.”
There were nine of them, all in full costume, at the rendezvous point, along with two dogs and six birds—only Farrell, Julie, and Hamid ibn Shanfara had none. To the left, hidden by a windbreak of eucalyptus, the Coast Highway buzzed and muttered; directly ahead, summer-stubbly grassland, parched gray-green and gray-blue, stretched away toward an uncertain horizon. The members of the Falconer’s Guild moved in brisk solitude, each one sharing a windowless silence with the hooded creature hunched on his fist. Frederik alone remained cheerfully conversational, paying no obvious attention at all to Micaela, except to stroke her legs slowly now and then. “She’s a Canadian gyrfalcon,” he told Farrell and Julie. “They’re the biggest of the falcons and the fastest. She can’t dive like a peregrine, but on the flat, nothing comes near her.”
“Weren’t they reserved for emperors?” Julie asked.
Frederik shook his head. “Kings. Emperors and popes got to fly eagles. I had a golden eagle once, but I lost him.” For a moment his dark, asymmetrical face turned as private as the other faces. “His name was Saladin. I had no business with him. Hamid remembers.”
“You going to tell me what I remember now?” Hamid asked mildly. He was dressed entirely in flowing white, turban to sandals, except for the red-hilted dagger thrust into his white sash. He went on, “What I do remember is, you didn’t lose that eagle. You let him go.”
Frederik did not answer. The Lady Criseyde said quietly, “It’s the same thing, really. You’re always saying good-bye to hawks; every time you flip them off the fist, you have to say good-bye. It doesn’t matter how well you know them—they’re never yours to lose or to let go. They’ll come back if they feel like it. It’s always their choice.”
The two pointers trotted along with a sedateness that surprised Farrell, who had never seen a professional bird dog at work. Dry grass pricked through the lacings of his soft shoes as he walked. Looking around at his companions in their cloaks and doublets and trunk-hose, cradling their hawks on one arm and their spike-tipped block perches with the other, he felt as if he were part of a religious procession on its way to reenact some vaguely sinister passion, whose lost significance only Hamid knew now. The impression was heightened by the fact that Hamid was telling him the story of St. Whale, the League’s patron, who came up out of the sea and walked like a man.
“And St. Whale went up and down, doing great wonders in the land,” Hamid half sang in the rough, carrying murmur that he used for reciting League legends. “For he healed the sick, and he raised the dead, and he spoke to volcanos and made them be still. And he comforted the wronged and the helpless and was their protector. Hail St. Whale, walking on his tail.” The last phrase recurred constantly, like a refrain.
Julie said, “I don’t remember the bit about the volcanos.” She was barely in costume, wearing tights, a loose smocklike blouse far too big for her, and an absurd purple beret, the size of a medium pizza, that had been Farrell’s once. The Lady Criseyde was letting her carry Strega, and she held the redtail close to her face, which worried Farrell.
“Just now put it in,” Hamid said in his normal voice. “Got real tired of him planting apple trees and inventing tofu.” He fell back into the ritual cadences of the legend. “Yet behold, the mighty came together, and they said, one to the other, ‘Shall it continue so? Shall a sea beast with no understanding have the name of a miracle worker and draw away our subjects’ love unto himself? Nay, nay, not hardly, Jack.’ But the people said, Hail St. Whale, walking on his tail.”
A rabbit bolted out of a greasewood thicket under the noses of the dogs, ran frantically parallel to the company for a moment, then vanished unmolested down a hole at the base of a live oak. It was the first sign of life that Farrell had seen in those crackling fields, and he had begun to wonder what the hawks would do for prey. Duke Frederik pointed, saying, “Overrun with them. All kinds of quail, too, and partridges. The guy stocked the place with chukars and pheasants years ago, trying to get the hunters to come out. It never really took—I think we’re about the only people who hunt here anymore—but it’s a candy store, if you happen to be a hawk.” He put his ungloved free fist gently against Micaela’s beak. She bit it briefly, but then rubbed her beak on his knuckles in an odd, twisting caress.