There was little sense of celebration. Dead men rose up and dusted themselves, chatting about weapons with their breathless killers, while the two medical students who served as paramedics dressed and bandaged real wounds, increasingly inexplicable. Prisoners drifted in through a deepening mist to arrange ransom terms; some tidying was done, and even a certain amount of dutiful ale-drinking and singing of victory. Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner had vanished with the sun. In time several men went to find Crof Grant.
Not a mark was on the body, nor was there any blood on the leaves where he lay. Ben and Farrell stood together on the island’s abrupt shore, watching the first rowboat heave away toward the lights. Nearby, Hamid ibn Shanfara was chanting a lament for all the fallen, as he did each year. “Gaily went they to the gods, this morning’s comrades.” The saffron shirt gleamed pink for an instant until the shadows took it.
Farrell said, “I kept hoping that somebody from another time couldn’t really kill somebody in this one.” Ben did not answer, and Farrell felt compelled to keep talking. “Well, Sia called it, after all,” he said. “Sia and Hamid.”
When Ben turned, his face was fifteen years old, an eggshell of pain. “They called two different deaths,” he said. “Egil’s gone.”
Farrell stared at him. The naked face said, “He’s dead. Egil’s dead. I felt him die.”
Farrell touched his shoulder, but Ben moved away. “You mean, you lost contact, the connection got broken. Is that it?” Right, Farrell. Of course that’s it. He wanted to put his arms around Ben, as he had seen Ben hold Sia, but he was afraid to.
“I mean he’s dead,” Ben said, “In his time, his real time, at the age of thirty-nine.” Farrell started to speak, then let him continue, anticipating the question. “I don’t know what he died of. I’ll never know. People died all the time back there in the ninth century; thirty-nine was getting on. But I’ll always think he died of me. Of what I did to him, what I made him do. I mean, maybe I wore him out, gave him an ulcer, a heart condition, a stroke.” His face convulsed suddenly, but no tears came. “I felt him die, Joe. I was trying to brace the gate, and he died.”
“That’s why you were calling his name like that.” Ben was scrubbing furiously at his mouth with the edge of his fist, scouring away the taste of death. Farrell said, “You don’t know you killed him. You don’t, Ben.”
The fifteen-year-old face turned toward him again, oddly swollen and lumpy in the dusk, as if swallowed sorrow had produced an allergic reaction. Ben was smiling slightly. He said, “You see, if I don’t know, I’ll wonder about it for the rest of my life. If I accept the fact that I really killed him, killed him a thousand years ago, then maybe I can stop thinking about it one day. Doesn’t seem too likely, but maybe.”
“Will you for God’s sake cry?” Farrell demanded. “You’re going to hurt yourself if you don’t cry.” But Ben shook his head and walked away toward a second rowboat about to put out from shore. Farrell stood looking at the water, imagining Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner sliding swiftly along in their kayak, tucked in snugly between the little dark waves. A large seagull followed the rowboat most of the way, swooping low as if to snap up the last herring-bright scatterings of daylight in its wake.
Chapter 17
Crof Grant’s death was set down to a heart attack. He had, in fact, a minor history of coronary complaints and had been advised against overexertion. The story made good copy and stayed in Bay Area papers for several days, not so much because of the police investigation, which was unimaginatively thorough, as because Crof Grant’s widow threatened to sue the League for Archaic Pleasures for thirty-five million dollars. According to the press, she blamed the League not only for her husband’s death, but for most of his life as well, from the decline of his professional reputation to his occasional attacks of gout, his increasing lapses of memory, passed-up offers of better jobs elsewhere, and the general decay of their marriage. “We couldn’t go anywhere! Half the time I couldn’t even understand what he was saying, and then suddenly he’s challenging the headwaiter to a duel for being an English sympathizer. The children wouldn’t even come to see us. Those goddamn people turned a perfectly good husband and father into the goddamn Master of Ballantrae.”
She never got around to filing the lawsuit, but she did hire a private investigator, who took his job seriously. He was visible long after the reporters had disappeared, patiently seeking out and questioning almost every man who had been on Cazador Island during the War of the Witch. His time and energy were completely wasted, in a sense, since the only ones beside Farrell who had actually seen Crof Grant die were presumably back home in the early Middle Ages; but he made people nervous, even so, and there began to be resignations. Too many strange, serious wounds had come home from this particular war; too many men were waking out of too-similar nightmares about fanged flying intestines or trying to talk of the sunset battle, and five faces with no more pity in them than the sunset itself, and always giving up the attempt with the same shrinking, half-imploring shrug. The detective told Crof Grant’s widow that he strongly suspected the presence of drugs in the case. She said she just knew it, and to keep digging after those goddamn people. “Sixty-one years old, as much sense as a rutabaga, and they killed him with their goddamn drugs. It explains everything.”
The reporters came back for the funeral, since it was attended—at the insistence of Crof Grant’s will—by a large formal delegation from the League, in full costume. Farrell stood with Julie and a couple of Grant’s muttering art department colleagues, watching as the plumes, hennins, capes, kirtles, tabards, gipons, mantuas, roquelaures, and pelerines flashed through the waxy air of the funeral chapel and swept bowing before the coffin. The League gained fourteen new members within the week, more than matching the resignations.
Farrell also appeared to be the only person to have seen Aiffe on the island during the war. Garth’s men denied categorically that she had ever led or sorcerously aided them, and two witnesses beside her father swore that she had spent that entire weekend visiting cousins in Cupertino. Farrell told Julie everything that he had seen happen, from Aiffe’s tantric coupling with Nicholas Bonner to Ben’s rage of despair over the death of Egil Eyvindsson, somewhere around the year 880. Julie listened silently until he finished, and then asked, “What are you going to do about it?” She had wept for Crof Grant with a vehemence that surprised Farrell, who had seen no one else do it.
“Well, I’ll talk to that guy she hired,” he said, “I don’t plan to go looking for him, but when he comes to check me out, I’ll tell him what I know. Fair?” Julie seemed satisfied enough, which pleased Farrell. In a burst of candor, he added, “I really hope he doesn’t show up, but I’ll try to tell him.” He truly meant to keep his word.
But the investigator did come to find him at work, and in the end Farrell lied to him, like everyone else in the League, by coffee and omission. “Jewel, it wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference. In the first place, he wouldn’t have believed a word of it, any more than the cops—I mean, I could feel that—and in the second place… Listen to me. In the second place, what difference would it make if he did believe me? The guy who killed Grant is eight hundred years out of town, over the border. We don’t have any extradition treaties with the twelfth century.”