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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.
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XVII
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
thirtyfive 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
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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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