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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."
As always when she was really angry, Julie looked as if she were
about to laugh. "The person who killed him is watching TV, doing a
little babysitting for pocket money, and so delighted she can't stop
hugging herself. She's getting clean away with murder, and now she
knows she can get away with it anytime she wants, because nobody will
ever say a word, no matter what they see. You have just personally
handed her the whole damn League, from which I have just this minute
resigned." Farrell started to protest, but she said, "Joe, get out of
here. I really want you to leave me alone for awhile. I'll call when I
feel like talking to you again. Go on, Joe, now." He left without
looking back, pointedly careful not to slam her front door.
Furious, bitterly defensive, trying himself on her charges a
dozen times a day and acquitting himself each time, with no discernible
effect on his sadness, Farrell spent the next two weeks either working,
practicing with Basilisk for the Whalemas Tourney--the lute back had
been expensively repaired, and everyone told him that it sounded as
good as ever, but it didn't--or shopping and running errands for Sia.
Ben was ill for some days after the war--Sia said it was flu-- but then
went immediately back to the graduate seminar on the _Haraldskvaeoi_
that he had been conducting all summer. He seemed perfectly functional-
-and completely without spirit, not so much listless as somehow exiled,
a squatter in his own body, a refugee enduring one more camp. A
student, encountered at Farrell's thirty-sixth viewing of _La Belle Et
La Bête_, told him that Ben had lately taken to breaking off during
readings to stare at his class out of blankly frightened eyes without
saying another word for the rest of the period. "Sometimes he makes
these sounds. Not crying, just these _sounds_, in his chest, over and
over; I have to leave when he starts doing that. Or he'll start
singing, right in the middle of an argument about word position, these
crazy old pieces of Norwegian fishing songs. They're going to find out
about him."
Farrell told Sia, who said that she knew and said little else.
More even than Ben, she appeared to be slipping into a chilling
solitude, neglecting her counseling work, her weaving, her carving, to
stump through the house in ponderous silence, attended always by the
wistful clicking of Briseis' claws. Her prowling was not at all
aimless; Farrell was entirely certain that she was looking for
something real and specific that she needed badly, but he knew well
enough that it would not be something he could help her to find. Once
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he woke knowing that she was standing just beyond the door of the guest
bedroom; but when he opened it, he saw her with her back to him, gazing
so intently at a blank wall that she did not hear him when he spoke to
her. "What is it, what are you looking at? Sia, what can I do?" She
answered him without turning, but not in any language he knew. After a
while, Farrell went back to bed. He lay awake for the rest of the night
and, if she moved at all from that spot, he never heard her.
She had not become mute or autistic; when she chose, she still
spoke in connected sentences on subjects enough to get through most
dinners, providing that Farrell cooperated by avoiding any mention of
the League for Archaic Pleasures or the War of the Witch. Their meeting
with the great goddess Kannon under alien, unbearable stars was also
off limits, though she surprised him by asking about Micah Willows,
with a faraway flash of her old mischief. "Now I don't want to find out
that he has already rented out Mansa Musa's room. He is not to be
taking in any more boarders, please."
"He isn't," Farrell assured her, adding without having planned
to, "I think he's likely to be a boarder himself pretty soon. I think
Julie's probably going to have him stay with her for a bit, after he
gets out of the hospital." She had never suggested this to him, but he
knew it suddenly to be true.
The two weeks were a bad time. He was lonely for Julie and as
deeply afraid for Ben and Sia as if they were his aging parents. There
was no one for him to talk to except Hamid ibn Shanfara. Hamid
sympathized, but had his own problems. "Whalemas Tourney coming on like
the Concorde, and I am not _ready_. Usually got the whole war wrapped
up tight by now, your basic epic, full of heroic deaths and family
trees, suitable for framing, member FDIC. But this war was hard to get
a grip on, you might have noticed that." Farrell nodded. Hamid said,
rather gently, "And you better go practice your music. Be a lot of work
for us both at the Whalemas Tourney. New king to be crowned, no
question about that, and a bunch of squires being made knights, and a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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