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Crof Grant ambled improbably by, munching on a dripping turkey leg and chanting with the vacant volume of a sound truck:
Julie slipped a pale circlet of woven clover stems over Farrell’s right hand. “Favor from a lady,” she said absently. “You have to have a name and a favor.” She smiled at him then and linked her arm in his, as briskly back with him as she had been suddenly gone somewhere cold and narrow. “Because of the noises,” she said. “Come on, let’s go meet King Bohemond of Huy Braseal.”
They crossed the clearing slowly, pausing often for Julie to be greeted as a sister by personages out of Charlemagne’s world, and Saladin’s, and Great Harry’s. Farrell was presented to a bright swagger of tunics, tabards, doublets, and mantuas answering to such names as Simon Widefarer, Olaf Holmquist, the Lady Vivie
There was no sign of Ben anywhere. Farrell would have liked a closer look at Aiffe, but she had vanished, though Garth de Montfaucon was ever present on the edge of all encounters, twiddling his mustache or the hilt of his sword. Then Julie was curtsying demurely before King Bohemond, murmuring, “God keep your Majesty.” Farrell dropped enthusiastically to his knees and cried out, “Long live the king! Kings may override grammar!”
King Bohemond said, “What the fuck?” The men standing with him all cleared their throats, and the king mumbled wearily, “Sorry. What bodeth this outlandish ma
“It’s my favorite proverb about royalty,” Farrell explained. “The Emperor Sigismund said it, sixteenth century sometime. I think they called him on using the dative case instead of the ablative.”
“Way to go,” the king grunted. He put both hands on Farrell’s shoulders, patting him in little tentative dabs. “Rise,” said King Bohemond. “Rise, Sir Pooh de Bear, most faithful of all my knights.” Farrell rose with some difficulty, for the king was leaning heavily on him, humming what sounded like Your Cheatin‘ Heart to himself. Farrell managed it by clinging unobtrusively to the griffin-embroidered silken stole that crisscrossed on Bohemond’s chest.
Julie said, “May it please your Majesty, behold, I have brought for your pleasure the flower of lute players, the true nonesuch of Huy Braseal.” Farrell blushed, which surprised him very much. He began to explain about his geas, but Julie interrupted and did it for him, speaking the moonshine English as trippingly as if she had been born to it. The king watched her with grudging admiration.
“Damn castle talk wears me out,” he complained loudly, wheezing nut-brown ale all over Farrell. “I call it castle talk because you can’t call it a damn language, it doesn’t have any rules. Just so it sounds like Prince Valiant would have said it. Pitiful, you know?”
The red Tudor cleared his throat again. “Sire, my liege, will’t please you join the Queen? She waiteth upon you even now, for to lead the galliard.” He had a high, toneless voice and deepset eyes like pearls.
“Castle talk,” King Bohemond said. “MGM talk, Classic Comics talk—Walter Scott, for God’s sake, it’s all bits and snatches of Scott, anyway.” His voice rose, turning sadly spiteful. “Of course, it doesn’t matter to them. They aren’t in ethnolinguistics, they don’t feel the slightest responsibility to language. I mean, fuck syntax, fuck morphology, right? Hey, whatever feels good.”
He spread his arms wide, striking an attitude of gri
King Bohemond said, “Nobody is above grammar. I mean, that’s like being above digestion, right?” He gri
A harshly handsome young woman, taller than he, was abruptly at his side, whispering grimly to him as she rubbed with a wet finger at a stain on his alba camisia. King Bohemond wriggled away from her, mumbling, “A people’s king,” but she moved with him, straightening his crown and tucking the trailing ends of his stole back into his girdle.
Julie murmured in Farrell’s ear, “Queen Leonora.”
“I believe it,” Farrell said.
King Bohemond broke loose again and inquired of Farrell with a sudden surprising dignity, “Th’art a musicker, sayest? Play an air for us, then, that we may know thee. For the reeds and the strings say who we are, beyond all misconceiving, and were each of us a man of music, there would be no more falsehood nor treachery in the world, surely.”
Farrell heard the black Saracen purr, “Nor no more marrying, neither.” His voice was a strange voice, soft and rough at once, sounding just at Farrell’s back, though he was standing nowhere near.
One of the musicians provided a lute, another a drum for a footstool. Farrell tuned the lute slowly, looking around the clearing. Among the gathering faces he saw the Lady Criseyde and Duke Frederik standing quietly together, while three children dressed as greenwood ragamuffins—the eldest could not have been twelve—perched stolidly on one another’s shoulders to see him. Julie had pointed them out, saying that they did tumbling, juggling and tightrope-walking at all the fairs. The Countess Elizabeth Bathory watched from the musicians’ dais, regarding Farrell with pudgy, cheerful voraciousness. Crof Grant, a snowplow in saffron, came cleaving his way through to the front, nodding and beaming upon the laird-haunted air, smiling forgivingly at those who hadn’t jumped aside in time. He finally caromed off Garth de Montfaucon and stalled just behind Queen Leonora.
Farell said, “Your Majesties. My lords and ladies all. Attend, I pray you, to a canso of the great troubadour Pierol, who was so sad in love so long ago.” He began to play a pattering, spidery prelude, retarding gradually after a few bars to a supple three-quarter time, barely emphasized. He sang in French, knowing better than to attempt the Provençal.